We are looking at seventeen disasters in U.S. history. We are trying to put in perspective the disaster of Biden/Harris becoming president and vice-president. Whether or not the election was stolen–personally, I think it was–the elevation of these two people to our highest offices is a disaster. As the next four years will prove, I think. But we’ll see. We are ready for disaster number 11.
11/The Vietnam War 1960?-1973. This cost us 58,000 dead, countless wounded, and untold treasure. For a losing war. If it had been a winning war, that would have been very little better. Perhaps even no better at all. Vietnam is not our country. If countries insist on going communistic, that is their decision. Communism won’t work–ask the Soviet Union, ask Red China–but hey, knock yourself out. How would we feel if Russia, China, or Canada said, “We think you people in the U.S. are going down a very wrongheaded path with your politics, therefore we are going to come into your country and straighten things out.” They would be correct that we are going down a wrongheaded path. But that is our problem. We would be furious at the military intervention of Russia, China, or Canada, in our country. We are not their business. Neither was Vietnam our business. It cost us many dead and crippled, to do something that should never have been done.
12/The Great Society 1965-present. It is built into the way mankind is wired that we flourish best as people when we work to provide for ourselves. You can blame God for this, or you can blame the universe, but it remains a fact. Once you start taking away the personal responsibility to earn a living, you start to ruin the people you are supposedly “helping.” You are not helping them; you are destroying their ability to function wisely in the world. This does not mean that all charitable giving is foolish and counterproductive. But charitable giving has to be done voluntarily and with careful practical wisdom, or it can backfire. A welfare state in which non-workers are financed by tax money extorted from workers at the point of a gun is not charity, and it is not wise, and it destroys the recipients. This of course does not mean the underclass are the only people being corrupted. Medicare, Social Security, public education at any level, farm subsidies, unemployment compensation–all these are aspects of the Great Society’s attack on personal responsibility. Of course some of these programs started well before 1965. But the Great Society only intensified the desire of most of us to live at the expense of other people. Almost everyone is now a thief at heart. Sounds like something called communism, doesn’t it?
13/End of gold standard, 1971-present. We don’t have any backing for our dollars. They are printed out of thin air. Why not print up a lot, and pass them out? We’ll all be rich! Well, maybe. This is not going to end well. Inflation (the increase in the money supply via dollars backed by nothing) gradually impoverishes those who work for a living. As a nation we are already bankrupt. When we discover that, it may be a hard landing for most of us. Dishonest money comes about because we have dishonest hearts. Do I detect a pattern here?
14/Roe v. Wade abortion decision, 1973-present. This is not rocket science. You can’t go around killing babies, and expect to get away with it. You kill 61,000,000 babies, and there are bad consequences. A country willing to kill its children, is a country committed to ending itself. It is a country not worth preserving. It is a country made up of self-absorbed, hard-hearted people. Children can be annoying, and difficult to take care of. Sometimes they are noisy, and sometimes they are sticky after tea, as one of E. F. Benson’s characters might say. But anyone who doesn’t like children need not make them. If you make them, it is not a practical solution to the inherent problem of their existence, to kill them. You wouldn’t go down to the local school and kill fifty children because they are sticky after tea. And you would be upset if some screwball did that, as some screwball occasionally does to great national anger. Then why would we permit the murder of 61,000,000 unborn children who probably would have proven to be sticky after tea if they had been born? We do it because we are totally nuts.
15/Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq 2001-present. Here we go again. Well, it is hardly worth complaining about. So far we’ve lost only about 6,700 killed. That is basically a rounding error from zero. Unless you happen to be one of the ones killed, or the family of one of the ones killed. Or one of the people in Afghanistan or Iraq killed. Or their family. Or someone crippled by the wars, rather than killed, whether you are from the U.S. or from Afghanistan or Iraq. Of course these wars have also cost a lot of money. But these wars have brought great benefits to the U.S., for example . . . okay, give me a little time here. There must have been benefits. Okay, I thought of one! We have been able to introduce transgender bathrooms to Afghanistan and Iraq, which otherwise would be so backward as never to consider having such a thing. We have in that fashion and no doubt in many others brought the blessings of “our democracy” to these backward people. So maybe these wars were not such a disaster after all.
16/The bailout of 2008. A thoughtful commentator who goes by the name of Bionic Mosquito has pointed out how in 2008 the calls by ordinary Americans were running highly against the potential bailout. The percentage of us opposed was through the roof. But it didn’t matter. Congress ignored us. They did what they wanted. The fix was in. So $787 billion was passed out, in typical crony capitalism style, to the in crowd. It is hard for us to process such numbers. But it is a lot of money. I did the math for one chapter of my book Getting Ready for Secession in 2016, and I figured out that if that $787 billion had been spread out among the 305,000,000 people in the U.S. (rough estimate at the time), each of us would have been bailed out to the tune of $2,580.00. I don’t know about you, but I would have felt bailed out to receive such a check. I was not advocating such a passing out of free money; it would have been very foolish to send out such checks. But at least each one of us would have received some personal benefit from such a bailout. No, instead the money went to corporate welfare recipients. The major point is: Congress is a complete disaster. We knew it before 2008, but they proved it conclusively with their bailout bill. How can any country survive when the political Powers That Be are completely corrupt?
17/The election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. These are people at enmity with Christian morality. Such enmity has been building in our elite class for a long time, but Mr. Biden and Mrs. Harris seem to be a further step in the direction of Satan. They hate Christians, but most of all they hate God. They have no good principles. Their only principles are to do the most wrongheaded thing they can think of among the ideas recommended by the most left-wing of their supporters. As I write, we are beginning the second day of the rule of Biden/Harris. Well, at least it should be interesting.
Those are seventeen disasters the U.S. has experienced. Each one was serious–is serious, because they continue to have consequences.
I promised to give several morals at the end. I hope to do that next week in the concluding segment of this series.