In the middle 1970's, a top Soviet general defected to the United States. In a book he published a few years later, he stated that there would come a Soviet Spring - when the winds of democracy would blow across the Soviet Union. This occurred as he stated. He next stated that this Soviet Spring would be followed by a global war on terrorism. We now know the truth of this statement. Next, he said, would be a war on asteroids and meteorites to be followed by a war on aliens. All these he said would be false. Deceptions and misdirection perpetrated by those in power to obtain more power and wealth for themselves while stripping people of their rights and turning the world into their own slave labor camp.
Although this General did not foresee the fall of the Soviet Union, everything else he stated has occurred, almost to timtable. We see the war on terrorism going on and growing worse while our freedoms are stripped away by the Patriot Act and the Department of Homeland Security.
The Discovery Channel and other vanguard cable channels report that the threat from space is growing; that meteors and asteroids could wipe out life on Earth if they were ever to crash into the planet.
Power is consolidating into the hands of a few at the expense of the many. To determine who is behind all this we need only "follow the money" as Deep Throat once stated.
Now President Bush is saying that we are winning a war that cannot be won, that the numbers of troops in country are sufficient to achieve peace and that the threat from Iraq is declining.
How much of this is sheer fabrication we do not know. This may be more of a Weapons of Mass Destruction type excuse. A Potemkin Village to disguise the truth behind paper thin facades.
In South Dakota, a vice president catches a cold while hunting. But this can be a most dangerous game in which a virus can spread to destroy those who would seek to control all.
The United States is in fast decline.
The United States has reached the point of "imperial overstretch" in which our domestic and worldwide obligations outstrip our ability to deliver on those obligations. Our budget is in deficit and our industry is in decline.
A restructuring is upon us, but the powers that be refuse to relinquish the past. The current administration and past administrations have done much damage to the power of the United States and the liberty that once flourished here.
Our colleges and universities, once the envy of the world are now in decline as visas for foreign students become harder and harder to obtain. The brainpower of these students is essential to the intellectual power of our great schools of learning.
Primary and secondary schools are unable to prepare students for life after school. In excess of 30% of students graduating from these schools are almost totally unprepared and unsuited for life after school.
Our moral and ethical decline is evident at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and in the way we kidnap innocent people off the street to whisk them away to foreign countries where they are tortured for months at a time.
American prisons house over 1% of the American population - mostly the underpriviliged and poverty stricken. Those who are released from prison use their new found prison skills to commit even more dastardly crimes.
Racial enmity, once on the decline, again threatens the inner city and urban and rural America. Hate crimes, violence against those who are different than we and crimes of state threaten every American and imperil the rights we have fought to sustain for over 200 years.
The Statue of Liberty should be weeping. For we are no longer a nation of the free and the brave. We are no longer a nation that opens its doors to the huddled masses of the world seeking to breathe free. We have turned our backs on immigration and in so doing, we have turned our backs on our future.
In all this darkness, and this is just a small sample, there yet is light. The American people are bold and brave and when faced with a challenge, we have always risen to the occasion - when led by enlightened leadership. But there is no such leadership in sight - yet. All we have now are partisan politics, power grabbing decisions and wealth accumulating strategies designed to strip Americans of their rights and wealth and voice.
We will win, as a nation, as a people and as idea. For America Is the land of the free and the home of the brave. That idea lives in our hearts, perhaps, as only an idea right now, but it shall return as a fact, as a lived out function of our daily reality - if noble politicians, bold leaders and enlightened individuals speak up and make their opinions known.
A new world is upon us. The economy becomes global and the world village manifests as a fact. Jobs, once the economic engine of the family and individual are passe in postindustrial states.
We need to relearn about finances, education, spirituality, politics and religion, as all of these are intertwined in ways most people are incapable of fathoming. And, those who can understand must teach those who do not. Enlightened leadership is required now more than ever. An understanding of metaphysical reality must meet with the sharp edges and hard planes of materialism and capitalism which have been the mainstay of the western democracies for a hundred plus years.
Now is the time for change, for the threat is great. President Bush is right about one thing - we are in dire and even fatal straits if we are unable to make things right.
America may be in decline. But it doesn't have to stay that way.
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