Last week, I was explaining to one of my friends from Sweden what town I lived in was like. The description that I gave here might have resembled something you might see in a horror film. It seems the social decay and internal rot is evedent everywhere you look. In your town, in your neighborhood, walking past a gas station. And what is the cause of all this, what we wish for someone to make it all go away?

Us, of course. We're at fault. Not terrorists. Not the government. Not God. Americans are at fault. We like these things the way they are. Can't you tell that you do? Do you do anything about it? Really, do you pick up litter, help deter crime, volenteer your services to improve the area you live in. No, our sin is the sin of not doing, of ignoring the facts, as if they would go away over time.

We think that if we vote officials with some smarmy slogan around his rich and capible shoulders that says he'll do something, that something will be done. We all know this is true, but we do nothing about it. America has in it the seeds of decadence so prevalent in the Roman and English Empires. We're rotting on the inside, and it is spreading with our help.

I know what you're think. "I can't do anything about it"? Not too far off the mark, am I? People like to point their fingers at whom is at fault. But it is we who is at fault. But it is also us whom can help. As Smokey the Bear said, only we can prevent forest fires. Well, there's a heck of a lot we can prevent, but we don't seem to have the will, the want, or the ego to admit it. Is it too late.

It won't be if we do something about it. There's a heck of a lot we are not kept away about. There's more that we're not even told about. Care for an example?

Our national forests have been preserved since the first Roosevelt Administration. We have great photographers, like Ansel Adams, to thank for that. But now with the current Administration, G.W. Bush plans to mow down through the middle, not one, but three different national forests for the construction of a future transcontinental superhighway, connecting New York City to Los Angeles, starting somewhere in the year 2005. I guess it would be to much to go around.

This hasn't been the first recent violation of things that Americans have taken for granted. Pollution standards are dropping, corporations are being watched less, despite recent turn of events, and the American Government is reeling in the possibility of mass apathy from the people it governs. So what has happened to us that has made us this way?

What has happened indeed?

I leave you with this:

"Alexander looked upon his empire, and wept, for there were no more worlds to conqure." -Classical quote

07/11/2002

Posted on 07/11/2002
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