Empire, falling

Over at the CF Mothership earlier today, I said this:

As I’ve been repeating for lo, these last several years, in my opinion July 4th should properly be a national day of mourning, not of celebration. But honestly, I can’t help but be of two minds (at least) on that. Yes, we have utterly failed in our duty to uphold the documents of America’s Founding, the Declaration and the Constitution. That being the case, however, it does NOT necessarily follow that the ideals, the principles, the bedrock definitional values of the Founding are not themselves worth celebrating, each and every year from now until Doomsday. Yes, even when we have a senile, corrupt old grifter roosting in the Oval Office.

So over the last cpl-three days I’ve been engaged in an internal tug of war over which direction I should take with this year’s Independence Day offering, both here and over at the Eyrie—which, in the usual run of things, I would’ve already finished by now.

I dunno, would you say that the title of this post maybe gives away which way I might be leaning here? Or no?

Fact is, it really is difficult to know where we are in America today. As you CF Lifers will recall, this blog was born in the immediate wake of the 9/11/01 atrocities; the domain name was registered on 9/14, if I remember right. Being a complete newcomer to this whole “blogging” phenomenon, I had no clue about the dominant bloggerware systems back then—GreyMatter, Moveable Type, etc. No clue? Hell, I didn’t even know such things existed in those earliest days.

So I whipped up a design for this crazy new trip I was embarking on over the next two days; Adobe GoLive (version 4? Or 5, maybe?) was my WYSIWYG web-design weapon of choice in those Aulden Thymes. The very first CF posts went up on 9/16/01. I had screenshots of that first effort stored on one of my old Macs, but alas, they’re gone with the wind now.

The one thing I know for sure: the America we lived in then bore little, if any, resemblance to the one we’re living in today. It’s incredible to realize just how drastically the US has changed in such a relatively short span of time. In fact, I doubt that there’s been any other twenty year span that DID see such radical, sweeping change to both the nation and its culture in our long history, with the Civil War v1.0/Reconstruction era being a possible exception.

Think of it: the very definition of so many of the words in our common language is now the exact opposite of what we once understood them to mean. The fundamental concept of what constitutes a man and a woman is in ferocious dispute. Half the country now takes it as read that the so-called “mainstream” media as well as the central government itself lies not merely occasionally but continually, reflexively—as if our national institutions were incapable of honesty and forthrightness. The short-lived spasm of national unity, purpose, and patriotic feeling right after the 9/11 attacks is beyond the wildest imagining today.

The Left has succumbed so completely to the unlovely temptations of radicalization, authoritarianism, and willful ignis fatuus that the very idea of living peacefully alongside them as friends, neighbors, and fellow countrymen with whom we might disagree on certain specific issues has come to feel like an absurdity, neither possible nor even particularly desirable.

The basic assumption now on the part of increasing numbers on both sides is not of an ongoing Union from sea to shining sea—however contentious and/or quarrelsome we might be among ourselves at times—but of conflict, violence, and, eventually, schism of one sort or another.

When freedom, individual self-determination, and the concept of natural rights themselves have all become points of intense dispute and conflict rather than shared values held in highest esteem by all Americans…well, can we still lay serious claim to being a country at all? Certainly, we’ve blown right past all that silly “one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all” bushwa greybeards like myself once recited in school, and left it choking in our dust.

Independence Day, like so many other precious and unique touchstones of American life—the Declaration, the Constitution, the Revolution, for starters—has been reduced to mere anachronism and irrelevance. Yes, there will always be a dwindling minority of us who will still reverence it, and take time out from our July 4th revelry to reflect on its deeper significance. We must always hold out hope that one day, after the awful reckoning that looms over us has passed into history, we can see to the proper restoration of its true meaning—for ourselves and our posterity, as somebody or other once said, I forget who.