America Alone:
The End of the World As We Know It
by Mark Steyn
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Posted on 05/02/2009 10:08:53 AM PDT by Rocky
My book America Alone is often assumed to be about radical Islam, firebreathing imams, the excitable young men jumping up and down in the street doing the old "Death to the Great Satan" dance. It's not. It's about us. It's about a possibly terminal manifestation of an old civilizational temptation: Indolence, as Machiavelli understood, is the greatest enemy of a republic.
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In most of the developed world, the state has gradually annexed all the responsibilities of adulthood—health care, child care, care of the elderly—to the point where it's effectively severed its citizens from humanity's primal instincts, not least the survival instinct.
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And now the last holdout, the United States, is embarking on the same grim path: After the President unveiled his budget, I heard Americans complain, oh, it's another Jimmy Carter, or LBJ's Great Society, or the new New Deal. You should be so lucky. Those nickel-and-dime comparisons barely begin to encompass the wholesale Europeanization that's underway.
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The inertia, the ennui, the fatalism is more pathetic than the demographic decline and fiscal profligacy of the social democratic state, because it's subtler and less tangible. But once in a while it swims into very sharp focus. Here is the writer Oscar van den Boogaard from an interview with the Belgian paper De Standaard. Mr. van den Boogaard, a Dutch gay "humanist" (which is pretty much the trifecta of Eurocool), was reflecting on the accelerating Islamification of the Continent and concluding that the jig was up for the Europe he loved. "I am not a warrior, but who is?" he shrugged. "I have never learned to fight for my freedom. I was only good at enjoying it."
(Excerpt) Read more at hillsdale.edu:80 ...
1. "The benign paternalist state promises to make all those worries about mortgages, debt, and health care disappear."
2. "The state as guarantor of all your basic needs becomes increasingly comfortable with regulating your behavior."
3. "When the populace has agreed to become wards of the state, it's a mere difference of degree to start regulating their thoughts."
4. "Dissenting ideas and even words are labeled as 'hatred.'"
5. "The long-term cost of a welfare society is the infantilization of the population."
He quotes a Belgian humanist: "I have never learned to fight for my freedom. I was only good at enjoying it."
What in indictment. Live free or die.
A caged animal has all of its’ needs met. Until it’s captor decides otherwise.
There’s also a moral aspect to that “indolence.” Of course we don’t call it that. We say we’re too civilized to do the reset that needs to be done. Too ethical to commit civil disobedience. We’re conservatives, we don’t break laws.
They break us.
“America Alone” is a VERY good book!
Or until the captor leaves the door open.
America -- a great idea, didn't last.
Some of these comments sound like the very ennui that Mark Steyn rails AGAINST.
?
America Alone:
The End of the World As We Know It
by Mark Steyn
(Paperback)
Kindle Edition
Hardcover
Hardcover
Audio CD
Audio CD
Audio Download
“Live Free or Die”, isn’t that the expression no longer believed by the people of NH?
It’s a damn shame that so few Freepers have taken the time to read his whole essay and comment.
Steyn is able to take the complex problems of our society and explain their cause and effect with simplicity and clarity.
Rather than caged animals, I think we become more like the circus elephants. When the elephant is small, a rope is used to restrain him. As he gets older, he never realizes that that little rope can no longer hold him. He has accepted his role as a captive, and he performs for his master.
More here! This guy is good! If you live near him, spend money with him!Casa D ice! 1901 Lincoln Highway North Versailles, PA 15137
Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
- US Declaration of Independence
So I've heard. I just ordered a copy.
Don’t give up. As long as you still have breath, there is hope.
While some of us get dejected when we see which way the government is headed, and how little the majority of people seem to care or understand, I don't think that most Freepers have truly succumbed to the indolence that Steyn is talking about. We at least understand that the situation is wrong and needs to be corrected. And I think even one who sounds like he is ready to give up can be stirred to new vigor with the right leadership.
Steyn, in his speech, recognizes that New Hampshire is not as free as it once was:
I looked at the rankings in Freedom in the 50 States published by George Mason University last month. New Hampshire came in Number One, the Freest State in the Nation, which all but certainly makes it the freest jurisdiction in the Western world. Which kind of depressed me. Because the Granite State feels less free to me than it did when I moved there, and you always hope there's somewhere else out there just in case things go belly up and you have to hit the road.
I wholeheartedly agree. I wish more people would read him.
He does have some interesting signs. Unfortunately, I don’t live near him.
Don’t think I am not dejected, too. And it does seem overwhelming. Faxing him letters and sending jokes around helps some, at a low level. We just can never give up.
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