The Roman soldier was not concerned about the fate of the Empire, stretching beyond the administrative reach, the politics of the day, the power and overreach of the patricians, the 600 Senators (senex = old man), the Roman army; soldiers only cared about the pebbles in their shoes because those pebbles caused them pain and discomfort when they marched on campaigns. They were happy when they were given “pane et circenses,” bread and circuses. Free gladiatorial performances in the arena kept them placid and pacified with free tokens for plain bread.
The Roman empire
was so vast that, when its most important city, Rome, the “Eternal City,” fell in
410 A.D. to Gothic armies camped outside its walls, the world then, devoid of
instant communication, took a lengthy gasp. The city that stood unconquered for
800 years fell to Germanic barbarians under the leadership of Alaric the Goth.
St. Jerome, living
in Bethlehem, is reported to have said, “When the brightest light on the whole
Earth was extinguished, when the Roman empire was deprived of its head, when to
speak more correctly, the whole world perished in one city, I was dumb with
silence.”
But the western
part of the empire lingered on for 66 more years until 476, at the end of which
Emperor Romulus Augustus was deposed by his German commanders. But the sacking
was just the straw that broke the camel’s back. Citizens had been poisoning
themselves with lead for a long time:
Romans drank from lead cups, cooked in lead pots, transported water
through lead pipes, and used lead oxide to sweeten their wine, just to name a
few of its many uses. Skeletons found around the vast empire exhibited classic
evidence of lead poisoning.
Sterility, probably
caused by lead, prompted emperors to encourage having more children to stop the
population decline. But, poor health, population decline, and indefensible vast
borders were just three of the reasons the empire declined and eventually fell.
One Greek
historian had remarked almost three hundred years before Rome’s downfall that
it had turned “from a kingdom of gold to one of rust and iron.” Our
infrastructure today, government, American exceptionalism, and everything that
had made America great a long time ago is fast turning into ruin and rust just
like Rome, the Eternal City.
Centuries
later, humans have not changed that much, they just have better medicine, machines,
and transportation. They may not all be soldiers but most only care about their
lives, the mundane, sports entertainment, the modern version of “bread and
circuses,” and the ability to feed, clothe, shelter, and protect their
families. They follow obediently the “government knows best” directives with blind
obsequiousness. But the government is made up of little dictators with many
faults, inabilities, dishonesty, and lack of vision for generations to come.
The
population does not care about politics, the machinations of Washington, D.C.,
the power grabs, the agendas, the control, and the theft of the nation. They
want a home, a car, electricity for heat and air conditioning, medical care,
preferably free, dignity, and freedom to live as they please. So, what will
happen to their “Shining City on the Hill,” the symbol of their empire? Will it
turn to ruin and rust as well?
What is the pebble
in the shoe of the 21st century American woke warriors? It is
capitalism and its tool of progress, fossil fuels.
The current woke
and delusional generations are determined to destroy their own successful
economy and replace it with a disaster promoted under the label of Democrat
Socialism and their platform of the Green New Deal.
Democrat
Socialism is just a new phrase invented by the left to repackage and sell the
old failed socialism model to the ignorant masses. The Green New Deal is neither Green, nor New,
and no Deal, it is just U.N. Agenda 21/2030 retreaded and euphemized to
convince the woke voting base that there is an annoying pebble in their shoe
and they can regress to a primitive life they’ve never experienced before and
go barefoot in order to save the planet from the scourge of humanity.
The old
Greenies and the younger Woke Warriors applaud the Green New Deal without
giving it a thought where electricity for their Teslas and other electric cars will
come from. They just feel instinctively that solar panels and wind
turbines will replace the “evil” and “poisonous” fossil fuels” that are killing
the planet and the cute little turtles choking on plastic straws, fishing nets,
plastic bags, and plastic bottles.
It is so
much better to make paper bags and destroy the trees that produce oxygen, trees
are so abundant and grow so fast, but, once Bill Gates and Harvard mitigate global
warming by spraying chalk in the upper atmosphere to block the harmful rays of
the sun, good luck growing anything, including trees.
So where
will electricity come from, woke warriors? Where will charging stations for
your fully electric cars, millions of them, get their electricity from? From the
fairy dust in the atmosphere, the same place where your food will come from
once you kill agriculture. Will you
produce enough electricity to sustain our large economy, production, travel,
heating, cooling, shopping malls, industry, technology, hospitals, and your
ever-increasing electronic gadgets and toys? Will this electricity come from:
-
Wind turbines
that only produce a small fraction of electricity when the wind blows at a
certain peak speed, turbines that must be manufactured and maintained with help
from fossil fuels, turbine blades that are difficult to recycle and must be
transported with heavy machinery operated by fossil fuels?
-
Solar panels –
the wafers do not last long, must be replaced, produced using fossil fuels,
cannot be recycled, are toxic for the environment, and need a lot of land to
display, land that is needed for agriculture. Who needs land to make food when you can eat
Bill Gates’ fake meat?
-
Nuclear power plants – none have not been built in this country in quite sometime and the
greenies reject the idea of ever building new ones, it is too dangerous to
humans and to the environment.
-
Hydroelectric power plants - The environmentalists want to destroy the dams necessary
for hydropower, the rivers must flow just like they did centuries ago, unimpeded
by man
-
Fossil fuels, oil, and coal - These are dirty words for the woke generation, they are
convinced that our current civilization can survive and prosper without them.
Maybe the social
emotional learning standards of equity over academic content now proposed by
the “progressive” Department of Education in Virginia will fill the social
justice warriors’ plates with food, bring electricity, heat, air conditioning, transportation,
and medical care. https://townhall.virginia.gov/L/GetFile.cfm?File=C:%5CTownHall%5Cdocroot%5CGuidanceDocs_Proposed%5C201%5CGDoc_DOE_4780_20210329.pdf
Perhaps the
woke generation has it all imagined and resolved – technology will be everything
and the news media, social media, and the climate change industrial complex
will take care of ALL their basic needs – food, shelter, cars, energy,
education, health care, travel, and non-stop virtual entertainment if they obey
the ruling elites.
In a nutshell: Marxism-Leninism has been successfully disseminated in the Land of the Free, hence we are now having a few generations of USEFUL IDIOTS calling the policies and deciding the America's future!
ReplyDeleteInteresting column. Too many generations, dumbed down, has allowed those who seek to control us to come very close to doing so. We can only hope and pray that they are not successful in completing their agenda.
ReplyDelete