Too Big for our Britches
A great winter outing between deployments, January 2020. It was great to be home in the USA.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the United States. God certainly allowed for our powerhouse nation to grow into something the likes of which the world had never seen before. Yet I’m convinced we’re seeing our mighty iron start to rust and flake away.
Arguably, in spite of the exploding growth and influence of China and other competitors, we still have sizeable influence on the international stage, given our population size relative to the rest of the world. The US represents “the West,” and our economy, in spite of its obvious recession, is intertwined with the rest of the world economy in such a lifeblood manner that it’s going to be present for duty for the foreseeable future. That said, there have been trends developing for several generations that I believe are detrimental to our growth, strength, and long-term standing in the world.
It appears that outsourcing production to far off places has driven several things. First, billions of dollars of manufactured goods are now imported, which shows that we have thereby limited ourselves with domestic production. I recently went on a search for domestically sourced and produced stainless steel silverware, and there is a single company based in New York that fits this profile. That’s almost unbelievable, considering how you can find utensils in just about any major grocery or department store, and certainly online.
Our economy is largely services based. The secondary and tertiary domestic reactions to Covid-19 showed that there is an ever increasing demand for delivery of the goods we want, to include food and other consumables. Americans like to buy take-out, and the lockdowns proved it.
We move further away each year from the industrial powerhouse of the 1940s, and the reasons why range from capitalistic opportunity for cheap Asian labor and shifting economic winds toward a service and luxury economy. Americans live a decadent and comfortable lifestyle compared to the rest of the world’s people.
Morally, it’s undeniable our country writ large is suffering severe, ongoing degradation. Politicians rule by bureaucratic decree instead of honoring the true role of our citizens, that is, to guide the nation through the processes of our democratic republic. Churches are even emptier post-pandemic. Awful things are taught nationwide to our children that drive racial tension, drive misunderstanding of our history, and encourage morally decrepit behavior, not the least of which includes encouraging children to sexually experiment and that their gender is malleable, fluid, or that they are anything other than boys or girls. Millions of dollars spent and millions of people encourage this deviancy from reality and Truth, and there are millions more who just don’t seem to want to do anything about it.
Frankly, I’ve watched a large number of my fellow citizens (and yes, fellow service members) never question vaccine and other mandates, promote something that infringes on personal autonomy and religiously-based values, or even worse, give the old eye-roll and “deal with it” rather than simply say no, this is a bridge too far. People fear that they must compromise to preserve their ways of life without trusting our maker to see us through in spite of obvious hardship. The military is a cross section of American society, for better or worse. It’s just obvious that people throughout the force are suffering the same ills of society, and a large part of that I sum up with the phrase “simply not giving enough of a damn.”
My fear is that our American dream was already fulfilled. It feels like it’s in the rearview mirror. We were in fact a country largely steeped in Judeo-Christian principle for many years. We weren’t perfect (how can an earthly nation of millions ever attain perfection?) but wow, I’d say there have been many decades of prosperity and promise. My childhood was safe and wholesome. I hope my own children can have the same.
9/11 brought change and war. Yet again, millions of Americans answered the call to duty, and many have paid dearly for it. Genuine American heroes were born, and I grew up in the shadow of these men and women in a forever-changed world. I joined the service largely due to sharing the same call to action, the same love of country, the same tear-shedding pride of what we have in America - and I still have it today. Now, it’s just in a different sort of shadow.
The other side of the post-9/11 world wasn’t as inspiring. It drove an incredible build up of the military industrial complex. Even as a kid, I sensed that the initial flood of patriotism and unity was unfortunately short lived. I think it actually reflected the unraveling our fabric. People united under the banners of protecting our free and peaceful way of life, fighting terrorists in their own backyard, and payback for the spilling of innocent blood. People became disenfranchised when the wars dragged on and terror still happened around the world.
It appears that most senior government and military officials did the best they could throughout the various wars in the Mideast that followed. On the other hand, there’s no doubt the hawks and execs at major military contractors have licked their chops as the years turned into decades of fighting and presence. We spent trillions of dollars, lost thousands of lives, found and killed evil men in remote corners of the globe, and unfortunately we caused countless collateral damages. There was always good within this struggle, but we were not willing to sustain our operations in Afghanistan with billions of dollars annually and thousands of Americans perpetually rotating into country without end in sight. And it cost us (and Afghanistan) dearly. It also cost us a strategic foothold that borders China.
Regardless of generation, many Americans are dissatisfied with the madness. People are starting to grasp at what they can to save their families and communities. We long for “normal” life again. We long for a sense of security that has felt stolen by the elites due to their neglect. We loathe the globalist ideas of “freedom from property” and “just do this and you’ll be happy.” Americans, and those who support our beacon of freedom, did not spill their blood in battle to enable a dystopian future run by madmen.
The Christian concept of subsidiarity is likely the only way we get ourselves out of this mess. Good, moral people need to affect change in their communities by flooding school board meetings if content is foul, participating in community service, evangelizing, strengthening our communities from within. We fight for America as a whole by fighting for virtue and sanity where we are planted. We win as Americans when we all say the buck stops with us. And when we fight for what’s right here…the whole world takes note. God does not abandon those who love Him.
There’s no way we can roll the clock back. We can’t have what was, but we can certainly try for a better tomorrow. We can re-forge our iron.
God help us, and God bless America.
-MJVW