I Secede

From the New Sisyphus blog, here is an aptly titled post, "I Secede". There's some good stuff in there, and while I don't agree with all of it, some things are very much spot on. Being a member of the younger generation, I am very fond of some of the technological advances, more enlightened (read: stay the fudge out of my business) attitudes re: certain personal decisions, etc. But the loss of other things, such as internal drive and motivation, personal responsibility, common courtesy, manners, chivalry, and so on, and seeing those things replaced with egocentrism, greed at all costs, race and identity-based politics, and a European *spit* sense of entitlement makes me queasy re: the future of our nation and civilization. Key excerpts below...read below, you decide.

"If 9/11 had really changed us, there'd be a 150-story building on the site of the World Trade Center today. It would have a classical memorial in the plaza with allegorical figures representing Sorrow and Resolve, and a fountain watched over by stern stone eagles. Instead there's a pit, and arguments over the usual muted dolorous abstraction approved by the National Association of Grief Counselors. The Empire State Building took 18 months to build. During the Depression. We could do that again, but we don't. And we don't seem interested in asking why. (1st paragraph quote via James Lileks)

There is the key, hiding, like our enemies, in plain sight. There it is, in all its glory and horror. We could do what needs to be done, but we do not. We used to be able to do what needs to be done, but today we cannot. We used to be able to roll up our sleeves and get to work, today we must not.

My nation lives there, almost suffocated, on the other side of this historical wall. People I love know nothing of it and think I'm mad for pledging it my loyalty. It can no longer be seen, but I can glimpse its corpse in the faded stars and eagles of the old Federal Courthouse in Portland. It's empty, standing embarrassed, near its new steel and glass counter-part. The best of my nation gives itself while its replacement nation hardly notices.

My nation would have accomplished in a month what the Bush "Administration" has in six years. My nation provided the capital on which we all live, built the streets in which we all walk, provided the infrastructure we are all now busily tearing down in joyful, adolescent, unthinking destructiveness. ...

Our leaders do not lead. Our lawmakers do not debate. Our journalists do not tell the truth. Our artists are wed to an avant-garde that was getting obsolete in 1961. I no longer feel the need to pretend. I will not give these people the time of day. ... (Emphasis Mine --Ed.)

My nation recedes when it should be striding confidently forward. Its replacement is wounded, perhaps mortally so, by self-inflicted wounds. The ironic cynicism. The adoration of sexuality above all else. The revolutionary power of the unhinged market. The lobotomization of historical knowledge. The mockery of honest labor. The importation of a laboring race. The easy grace of lifestyle.

I live in my nation, and yet do not. I find it harder to find every day. I used to tell myself that when my nation awoke shrugged off the sluggishness of slumber the world would gape. But what I took for a sleeping giant was a hollowed-out husk. Of a government, and a people, who have no pride.

You might say that I am dispirited, but you would be only partly correct. I will no longer have anything to do with the replacement nation. Its deathsong is so wrapped in its founding sinews it will not last nor give comfort. But it gives plasma screens, hot wet teens and all the civil liberties you can eat. And how happy a people we are. (Emphasis Mine --Ed.)

There have always been wolves among the sheep. At any time they could separate one from the herd and do what comes natural to wolves. But the sheep organized and fought back. They even had their own wolf-hounds, as vicious as the wolves in their own way but to entirely different effect. But never have I seen such an adoration for the criminal as among the people of the replacement nation now. The thug's tatoos now adorn the arms of our young women, the pop charts populated by real and imagined gangsters, the fashion set to mimic those who kill, who brutalize, who cheapen. The chardonnay sippers never miss The Sopranos...same sh*t, re-packaged for taste.

I do not feel what these people feel. I do not see what they see. I do not share their hopes. I despise their dreams.

I dissent.

I object.

I secede."