Hunker in the Bunker and Wait for the Rain June 8, 2012
Posted by Dr. Robert Owens in Politics.Tags: America’s decline, Cold War, culture wars, Dr. Robert Owens, Economic collapse, Obama’s agenda
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As those of you who follow these wandering pages know I have recently re-aligned my life to turn and face the strange changes that are overtaking Western Civilization with ever increasing speed. Like ripples whose shape and size shifts but never leave the stream, change is the only constant in a society careening towards a cliff.
The descendants of those who built the empire no longer produce enough children to man the walls. The will to win and the desire to excel has been replaced by a complacency bred of bread, circuses, and entitlement checks distributed by a perpetually re-elected legislature designed to keep the marks from catching the con. A series of lack-luster presidents set the stage for collapse. One declares a new world order and then loses his bid for re-election to a saxophone playing party-boy. This surprise president sets the morality bar so low his scurrilous actions and obvious lack of character corrupt the very fiber of our nation. The next two expand the government and spend us into oblivion.
Empires rise and empires fall. That is the way of the world and the lesson of History. From the 15th century through the 20th Western Civilization used a temporary advantage in technology to conquer the world. Where our military conquered we imposed our culture. Where we didn’t gain political control the vision of our seemingly invulnerable strength and our unstoppable progress led local leaders to discard much of what was theirs to imitate what they coveted of ours.
For five centuries Western Civilization ruled supreme. It was our way or the highway so in our pride we decided ours was the High Way. Then in two spectacular bouts of societal suicide, World War I and World War II, we killed, maimed, and butchered ourselves. We wasted the accumulated riches of centuries and showed the millions of colonial subject people who were brought in to help kill whoever the enemy happened to be that Westerners weren’t invulnerable, weren’t unconquerable, and weren’t even smart enough to avoid the slaughter or hide the evidence.
The destruction of the economies and populations of the various colonial powers inevitably led to the break-up of the empires and the rise of a bi-polar world that pitted a world-wide Communism that was inimical to everything Western Civilization stood for against a united West now led by the newest edition to their ranks: the United States.
We had allied ourselves with the Communists to defeat the Fascists. However the victory of 1945 vanished into fifty years of a Cold War that flashed hot enough times to kill many tens of thousands. This epic struggle brought the Communists to their knees and us to the edge of bankruptcy. As we defeated Communism its less threatening little brother Socialism crept in the back door. We adopted the tenants of socialism: equality of outcome financed by expropriation and wealth and re-distribution to pacify our population through the long war. Today we are fast becoming all we have fought against for the last sixty years: a centrally-planned economy, a regimented society, and a totalitarian state.
This century long series of debilitating wars sapped our will to reproduce just as technology gave us birth control and lax morals gave us abortion. This unholy trinity turned into a demographic time bomb that ensures the eventual submerging of the peoples of the West beneath waves of immigrants swarming in to take their place. The moral rot swilled out from Hollywood, and a reality show culture exemplified and condoned by the political elite inspires and reflects a hedonism that would have made Caligula blush. The entitlement mentality foisted and fostered by buy-a-vote-with-benefits governments has sapped people of the drive and desire to do anything more than sit on a couch and dream of their chance at the golden ring of fifteen minutes of fame.
Sounds like a dismal picture doesn’t it? The most depressing part of the whole thing is that it is true.
Empires rise and empires fall and it is our lot to live on the declining end of Western Civilization: the greatest empire of all time (so far).
No one ever gets to live in the world they were raised in. Time moves on and things change. However most generations don’t watch the inversion of the world they grew up in. Today things we thought were wrong are now right. Things we thought were right are now wrong. What made you healthy yesterday kills you today. The wisdom of the ancients was once sought after in a world of constants today obsolesce often proceeds production in a microwave throw-away culture.
The world has been turned upside down.
Just as a British general marched out of Yorktown to surrender to a rag-tag bunch of summer soldiers, so we the children of those who stormed the beaches on D-Day to free Europe and end the darkness that was Nazism will wonder how were we defeated by those we had once so easily dominated?
The answer will be the same as it was for the British in the Revolution and for the Nazis in World War II: we defeated ourselves. Our over confidence and our desire to have it all led us to forsake the values that brought about our success and the principles that made us who we were. While the Socialist Progressives march us off to the shabby future they have centrally-planned perhaps instead of the World Turned Upside Down we should sing a paraphrase of a line from the sixties, “In tattered tuxedos they face the new heroes and crawl about in confusion. All the hands raised; they stand there amazed at the shattering of their illusions.”
We stand at the edge of the abyss. We know not what will be only that it will not be what it has been. Do not despair. Do not lose hope. Have faith in Christ. Follow Him and He will guide you to a safe harbor amidst the storm. I have found my place. I am preparing every day for the coming crescendo. My best advice is find Christ, find your place, and hunker down.
Keep the faith. Keep the peace. We shall overcome.
Dr. Owens teaches History, Political Science, and Religion for Southside Virginia Community College. He is the Historian of the Future @ http://drrobertowens.com © 2012 Robert R. Owens drrobertowens@hotmail.com Follow Dr. Robert Owens on Facebook or Twitter @ Drrobertowens
It’s Never Too Early to be Too Late November 17, 2009
Posted by Dr. Robert Owens in Uncategorized.Tags: 9-11, Boomers, Cold War, Fort Hood, George Bush, Great Depression, Greatest Generation, Gulf War, Korea, Lost Generation, Mainstream Media, Millennial Generation, Osama, Political Correctness, Vietnam, War on Terror
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If no one has told you this yet let me be the first, as you get older time goes faster. If you’re under thirty you’re thinking, “This old coot has finally gone off his rocker! Everyone knows an hour is an hour. So how can time go faster as you get older?” If you’re between thirty and forty you’re thinking, “Who’s got time to think about time and who cares? I’ve got to go to work!” If you’re between forty and sixty you’re thinking “He might have something there” as you day-dream about those endless summers when you were in High School. If you’re over sixty you’re hoping time doesn’t end before you finish reading this paragraph.
Besides being a dimension time is a concept that’s inextricably intertwined with our material reality as in the space-time-continuum, E=MC2 and all that. It took the genius of Einstein to find a way to prove what every old man knows, time can move at different speeds for different people. Knowing all this is little comfort when confronted with reality. The last wave of the Millennial Generation has entered college. I now teach History to students born after the end of the Cold War adults who’ve never known a day without a personal computer, the internet or a cell phone.
When the weapons of the superpowers became too terrible to use the Lost Generation, those who fought World War One and led the world through the Great Depression and World War Two gave America the Cold War. For those too young to remember this was a 50 year conflict marked by bellicose rivalry and our first modern limited war in Korea. Not to be outdone the Greatest Generation, those who grew-up in the Great Depression and fought World War Two and Korea gave us escalating tensions, naval blockades and another limited war in Vietnam. They finished with a flourish by winning the Cold War and then doing a hundred day encore in the Gulf.
The Boomers hit the White House like guest hosts on Saturday Night Live with a snappy monologue and a party in the Oval Office. They tried to keep the limited war train rolling by occupying Bosnia. Losing a Blackhawk in Somalia and bombing Serbia for Kosovo. Then Boomer George met Osama in New York. Enter the first post-boomer president and a War on Terror becomes a law enforcement problem just as Korea with 55,000 dead was a Police Action. Have we refined limited war to the point that we aren’t sure whether it’s a war or a series of unrelated unfortunate incidents?
A friend who optimistically believes every cloud has a silver lining hopes the tragedy at Fort Hood was merely the work of a volunteer in the Insane Clown Army and not a terrorist attack on an American Army base in our supposedly safe Homeland. This struck me as symptomatic of the age we’ve entered; call it the Reality Show at the End of an Era. In the land of the free and the home of the brave the best we can hope for is a demented mass murderer because the alternative is too frightening to face. If home-grown Jihadists are beginning to kill the brave in bosom of the Heartland it won’t be long before check-points and internal passports begin restricting the free in the byways of the homeland.
Have you ever noticed that after Pearl Harbor we didn’t declare war on sneak attacks? Instead, we declared war on those who attacked us. In America today we’re constrained by the emasculating cult of Political Correctness from even naming our enemy. Our leaders blather on about religions of peace when people hold street dances to celebrate 9-11 and mobs murder and burn in reaction to an offensive comic strip. Now we have a person doing his best to enlist as a foot-soldier in Osama’s army while serving in Obama’s, shouting the catch phrase of the 9-11 bomber pilots as he murders more than a dozen unarmed innocents and the Corporations Once Known as the Mainstream Media pussy-foot around trying to give us the false hope that he’s merely a homicidal maniac.
It’s time to understand that if we don’t stand for something we’ll fall for anything and until you admit you have a problem there’s no chance of finding a solution.
Time is slipping into the future. Are we going to stand complicit in our silence as wars without limit fought by people who proudly proclaim they love death more than we love life shoot our unarmed citizens in the name of God? Will we allow apologists for evil to blame the second amendment instead of telling us the truth?
It’s time to rise up and say enough is enough! We know who are enemies are and we know who we are! If the brave want to keep their land the free can’t sit at home chasing the remote. Whatever speed time is moving its going too fast to wait. It’s never too early to be too late. Let’s roll….
Dr. Owens teaches History, Political Science, Religion, and Leadership for Southside Virginia Community College. Contact Dr. Owens. © 2009 Robert R. Owens http://robertrowens.com/ Dr. Owens is available for speaking engagements.
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