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I’m getting old. I’m only 48. Far from old, but I find I can’t stop thinking in that stereotypical format attributed to old men.

You know... Kids today are lazy and immoral. The world is going to hell in a handbasket. You know the stereotype.

I would love nothing more than to look toward America’s future with hope and see out best days ahead. But I can’t. I just can’t. I look ahead and I see so little reason for hope, which makes me furious and makes me pray that I have it all completely wrong.

This article talks of a more crowded, more congested USA. As I’ve grown older, I’ve come to cherish free space and the intimacy and privacy and solitude that comes with low density. Yet the politicians have insured that that future cities will be much more crowded and expensive than today’s crowded and expensive stress-inducing cities. And I look ahead and I’m sad that I see a much worse America for future generations of children and grandchildren.

I look ahead and see balkanization and fracturing of people into tribes of whites and blacks and asians and hispanics, co-existing but not really participating in one American community, nationwide or locally.

I look ahead and see more communism and more government control and less freedom and less privacy.

I could go on for hours about this, but I had to get it off my chest.

I really wish I could sit here and write that I see America transitioning to a better future with more privacy, more personal responsibility, and more freedom and I wonder if I have an old man’s blinders on, seeing the world going to hell in a handbasket, or if I am accurately seeing a bleaker American future, like watching the 1st days of the fall of Rome.

Hell, look at personal property alone. Look back a hundred years, maybe more. A man’s land and his horse and his guns were his own. He could work his land and use his horse and employ his guns as he saw fit, as long as he didn’t damage another man.

Sure, we own our own homes, once the mortgage is paid. We own the title. But stop paying property taxes and you lose your home, so it is not really your own property. If you build on your land without the proper permits, you go to jail. If you want to cut down a historic oak on your land, you will be prosecuted for committing a crime. If the environmental Nazis find a wetland or endangered species on your land, they control what you can and cannot do, and if you violate their demands, you are a criminal and will go to jail. The government can now even take away your land for uses other than strictly public uses. We no longer have private property in our homes because there are so many conditions placed on that property or you can lose it or go to jail.

And that is not all. If you shoot a criminal who breaks into your home, you can be sued by the criminal. If a kid jumps in your backyard pool and drowns, you can be sued by the parents of the kid who trespassed in your yard. This is insanity.

Your car is the same way. Where once you owned a horse, now the government claims that driving is not a right, but a privilege. If you commit a crime like drunk driving, you can have your car taken away and sold without just compensation, as required by the 5th amendment. You cannot change the motor or emission system or use leaded gas or use tires too wide or you are a criminal. At any time you can lose your driver’s license for any number of reasons, rendering you car — your personal private property — useless to use on the roads your fuel tax dollars helped pay for.

Guns are similar. Handguns are now registered and the government can take them away any time they decide they want to. This isn’t common yet, but just you wait and see.

These are but 3 examples in only 1 area — the destruction of personal property rights in modern America. And I could go on and on in any number of categories regarding our losses of freedom and privacy and control over our own lives and our own children.

I won’t write a book here but as an example of how I could go on all night, think about all of the control parents are now deprived of over their children. Young girls can get abortions without their parents being notified, and therefore never even knowing their daughters were pregnant. Homosexual education is promoted in schools without ever notifying parents this will occur. They are teaching Islam in schools now, again without notifying parents.

So I won’t go on and on. But I look ahead to America’s future and I want to scream or cry. We keep voting and writing letters and it goes nowhere. Freedom is trampled year after year, election after election, decade after decade, generation after generation. It doesn’t stop.

I’m livid that I can’t look at an optimistic future. I’m horrified. I’m furious. And it makes me feel like an old man just seeing bleakness and seeing America going to hell in a hand-basket, but that is how I feel.

I wish America was moving toward more individual freedom and privacy and I could bask in the feeling of optimism and hope. I don’t want to be this bitter or mad all the time.

And then I read an article like this and see an even more bleak future, a balkanized nation around a tower of Babel where crowds shove at each other and nobody knows or helps one another. I just want to scream. I want to kill somebody.

I am only 48 years old and my country is gone. My America is gone. They are destroying my country before my very eyes and they are doing it on purpose. They have learned absolutely nothing from the Nazi concentration camps and from Stalin’s purge. Nothing. And the same type of well-intentioned idiots who supported Hitler with great idealism and hope and who supported the Red Communists with such ironclad idealism and hope, are doing it again here.

Bush’s legacy is the continuing destruction of all that Jefferson and Madison and Adams held dear. Ted Kennedy and Boxer, Feinstein and Shumer are intentionally shredding all that the founders held dear. Out entire safety net, all those controls that the founders ingrained in their wisdom, built from the sacrifice of their own blood and their own children and their own fortures, is being dismantled before my very eyes — and they are doing it on purpose because they are filled with greed and lust for power.

And they have learned nothing, absolutely nothing, all these years.

I have no hope. Think how that feels. Think how empty that feels to have no long term hope for your country.

No, I’m not going to put a bullet in my brain, though that is always an option. I enjoy my life and I have goals and desires and want fun and entertainment.

But is it any wonder that all I want is to drop out? Scratch and claw my way through every forsaken day to retirement and then just drop out. Move to the least crowded, least culturally diverse small town I can find, cross the moat, lift the drawbridge and bar the gate behind me. Enjoy my little corner of the world and fiddle while the country I love, the country that George Washington and Sam Adams tried to give me, while she burns.

Thing of how that feels. Is there anything much worse than the feeling of despair that comes from the lack of hope. You could be publicly humiliated, tortured and executed, and even that is tolerable, if that price is paid because you know your wife and children escaped to freedom and a brighter future. The suffering of pain and the anxiety of coming death is borne knowing it was for the freedom and safety of your wife and children. You have hope.

I have no hope for America. That makes me ashamed and makes me furious. And I feel very, very old.