Cultural Survival Skills

America’s End-Game

My wonderful Father, William James Mawhinney, often laughed at people who predicted the end of the world, America’s downfall, or various cataclysms coming. I think he was just too practical minded to get caught up in such matters. He light-heartedly warned me that such predictions were generally quite wrong. He may now be chuckling and shaking his head at me as I write this little piece.

For the first time in 49 years of married life together, my beloved wife Sally did not vote. She had undergone open heart surgery and just did not have the strength to go to the polls. We came up with various ideas about how to get her to the polls, but in the end her debilitated condition trumped them all. Of course, knew the truth..her one vote would not matter…and it did not matter in Indiana.  It was more a tradition and her cultural history that was defeated. Sally is recovering beautifully and, God Willing, she will live to vote many more times.

As  I limped to the polls, another old man limped out of that door into the cold early morning. He cheerfully addressed me saying: “The frost is on the pumpkin!”. I smiled and chirped back: “Yes it is!”. I love that old early American exclamation echoing to me through this old man and from my childhood.

That day was a cold Autumn morning and I would soon learn what I had feared for a very long time,  it was also the Autumn of our traditional American Culture. The old man and I were only evanescent vestiges of a time long gone by.

That night as we watched the polls, Bill O’Reilly stunned me with his calm clear  assessment of the early election returns strongly favoring Obama. His assessment was my own: America had reached the tipping point. There were more takers than makers. The highly motivated takers would out-vote the makers and the traditional tired and infirmed elderly.

O’Reilly said that too many people “voted for stuff”. He said that the party that promised to give them the most “stuff” was the party that would win.

O’Reilly had much more to say a few days later on his show, The Factor. I desperately want you see and hear what he said. It mirrors the results of my scholarly research over the past 30 years.

I am not as optimistic as O’Reilly about our ability to correct the numerous avenues of our American decline. I am more with Dennis Miller’s position, presented in this video. On the other-hand, Rome suffered many declines and recoveries before its final decline. Perhaps it could be so with America.

Some may find solace in the fact that  former “Greatest Nations On Earth” are still with us (Greece, Rome, Great Britain, etc.) Similarly, I sadly expect that America could also live-on as shadow of its former self.

I would delight in being wrong about all of this, in fact I certainly could be….and Dad would chuckle, shake his head and say: “I told you so!”

Why don’t you look at the facts and see what you think?

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/oreilly-lambastes-obama-secular-progressives-who-are-bent-on-destroying-traditional-america/

V. Thomas Mawhinney, Ph.D.

11/14/12