> Clearly you hope all of those things. Though, this entire
> last paragraph doesn’t really seem to follow your concerns
> about terrorism and methamphetamines… I find your posts
> interesting JadussD, but what is your point?
My point is that America is going to collapse into an authoritarian government due to a deterioration in the core values which sustain it, resulting on one hand in fatalism, selfishness, and ignorance on the part of voters, and more importantly, in the people who are elected to run this country.
My point is that our economy is based on producing excessive plastic crap using finite natural resources and convincing people to buy it, and that conspicuous consumption is unsustainable.
My point is that every great way of life rises at some point, and falls at some point, and that this is cyclical and shows up throughout history. The problem is less Bush, more like the fact that when there's a hurricane, the guy who's running FEMA is incompetent AND (this is pretty critical): thugs with AK-47s are going roving about, acting like they just swept into New Orleans and they run the place. That wasn't even happening in Indonesia after the tsunami; even the Indonesian rebels around Sumatra, for all their reputation of brutal guerilla warfare, horrific massacres, and general skullduggery, know that when their entire fucking city just got owned by mother nature, that its not the appropriate time to break out the automatic weaponry.
America is on a decline because of its values; the constant, obscene displays of looting that occured in New Orleans has as much to do with selfishness and materialism being thrust at Americans by advertisers as it does poverty and the desperation of the situation. Americans are now conditioned to use wealth to surround themselves in their own purchased version of reality, being conditioned to believe that they can turn his reality into anything they can afford, as long as they have the money. In the same way, they are manipulated by the media, who inject profitable values into society through venues like talk radio by, for instance, providing a left-wing opinion, a right-wing opinion, as if the listener should just pick the one he likes best. Thus, the tendency of large masses of people to act in a more or less predictable manner allows the media to maintain its grip on ideas, dividing Americans into Republicans and Democrats. The truth is not sought out. Issues which can be decided by the determination of truth value, such as the existence of global warming (it exists, we're contributing to it, and its a grave problem looming in our near future) become a matter of opinion, as the media creates content by finding someone who's willing to distort the facts and tell people who don't want to believe it exists what they want to hear, in order to CREATE debate on the issue. The post-modern disease is one in which people are made to form their own reality, to redefine what they are instead of merely being who they are, and this drives people away from each other. Human beings become islands who can't even relate to themselves, let alone have non-superficial friendships, loving marriages, or kids who don't correctly think their parents are totally full of shit.
I could go on and on demonstrating how America is corrupting itself, entertaining itself to death, paving the way for its demise. No one's orchestrating it, it comes from within, and it feeds on itself until something stops it. It's a cycle: Crowd takes over, Crowd has democracy. Crowd gets dominated by manipulators. Manipulators corrupt crowd. Society loses any sense of direction, and eventually, things go to hell and you end up with a dictatorship, an empire, or as a Chinese province.
<P ID="signature"></P>