A Norwegian goalie screaming at the World Cup made me realize what America lost. It isn't patriotism. It's the evidence that would justify it. And the most comfortable sentence in American life is the one keeping it gone.
Democracy isn’t a spectator sport. You as a citizen must do your part, vote, and participate. We as a nation must make it possible for every citizen to do so, as SCOTUS doesn’t respect the right of every citizen’s rights to vote and to have equal representation. Neither does our current president.
Exactly right, and the part that always gets buried is your second half. Participation only works if the system actually lets it land. When representation itself is tilted, telling people to just vote harder is like telling someone to bail faster on a boat with a hole in it. Both things are true at once: show up, and fix the hole. Appreciate you setting the tone here.
The voting part is what people from both parties need to hammer home first.. The fact that we had an election between somebody that was anointed without a vote and Donald Trump in 2024 is a very bad sign for democracy in general
Excellent! You reminded me of thoughts and feelings I’ve had for a verrry long time. The feeling that America has gradually been investing in itself less and less. Schools, research, the lower class etc.
I had a realization, a long time ago. There could be an Einstein born every year. But if he’s born poverty and crime infested neighborhoods he’ll never get the opportunity to fulfill his destiny.
I used to feel proud to be an American but now it’s more an embarrassment when I think of how petty and selfish and inconsistent we appear to the world these days. Thank you DLT!
The Einstein point is the entire essay in one image. There's a genius born every year in a zip code we've quietly decided not to invest in, and we lose that person, and then we call it their failure instead of ours. On the embarrassment, I feel it too, but one reframe: shame means the standard is still alive in you. The dangerous day isn't the one where you feel embarrassed. It's the one where you stop. That feeling is the receipt not being fully torn up yet. Thank you for this.
I think we’re back to the plutocracy wanting the money for themselves and the right wing convinced that the money will be stolen or wasted. Funny thing is that the money IS being stolen by the plutocracy.
Here we are back in the circle we keep pointing out. While we’re fighting each the wealth keeps going up to the 1%. WAKE UP AMERICA!
You just said the whole thesis in three sentences. That's the loop exactly: they keep us fighting over whether the money will be stolen or wasted, while the actual theft happens quietly, in the other direction, the entire time. The genius of it is that both sides are half right, which is what keeps the argument alive forever. The right isn't wrong that money gets stolen. They've just been handed the wrong thief. Point the anger up instead of sideways and suddenly a lot of people who "disagree" turn out to want the same thing.
What do you think? I just thought that a final piece of my slow motion coup could be predicting the next steps. Maybe that would help increase awareness and attention to the issue?
And when are we going to admit that voting once every four years, choosing the lesser of two evils, then disappearing until the next election isn’t civic engagement?
It’s civic absenteeism.
A democracy isn’t something you inherit.
It’s something you maintain.
Or someone else will maintain it for you.
Pride isn’t a feeling.
It’s a receipt.
The only question left...
...is whether we’re willing to pay for the next one.
"Civic absenteeism" is better than anything in the actual piece. I'm stealing it.... Wait a minute I don't have to steal it.. it's mine!!!
You took the receipt line and finished the thought I was circling around... you don't inherit it, you maintain it, or someone maintains it for you, and lately someone has. And that last line, whether we're willing to pay for the next one, is the whole ballgame. Thank you for reading it this closely.
Ha, appreciate you. The run for office thing is the trap, though. The whole argument is that we keep waiting for a guy on a horse to come fix it, and that waiting is exactly how they keep it. I think I'm more useful out here saying it plainly than I'd ever be in there. Glad it lights a fire. That's the entire point of writing it.
I was on the tail end of the greatest generation and ready to leave college to fight in Vietnam.. but before taking such a big step, I thought I should do some research. Nobody could give me a coherent explanation of the purpose of the war. In fact, it disgust me what this country does to people around the world - killing people by the millions for no particular reason except there’s money in it. I got a fellowship to go to grad school in mathematics but the draft board said no. If you go to graduate school, we will draft you so fast, your head will spin so I chickened out and never got the PhD. In retrospect I think I could’ve beaten the draft board in court.
Steve, this is the piece I wish I'd written. You did the thing almost nobody did: you stopped and asked what it was actually for, and when no honest answer came back, you noticed. That instinct is the whole ballgame, and it cost you a PhD to keep it. I don't think you chickened out. I think you refused, and the machine punished the refusal, which is a different thing entirely and the more honorable one.
And the part that should haunt everyone is that you couldn't get a coherent purpose out of anyone, because there wasn't one that could be said out loud. That's the tell, every time. When the reason can't survive being spoken plainly, the reason is money. Thank you for being here and for telling it straight.
Absolute fact, all the way around. (Minor quibble: I don't think unions were great overall, but the idea of more worker representation was a good idea). My idea of "my country" might be different than yours. I've always despised the government, and it's gotten much more despicable so I've adjusted gradually. "My country" is the people (at least in my neighborhood), and the magnificence of the actual real estate. Yeah, I don't identify with three quarters of the people either.
Video killed the radio star. The internet killed Ozzie and Harriet. Darwin killed Manifest Destiny. All of that killing adds up.
The DSA people and TDS crowd should probably lighten up a little though. The rest of the world isn't doing that much better than us. Europe is hip deep in the same moral sewer America's living in now. The people with a purpose and an agenda and the discipline we had in World War Two are living in China and Singapore. But their idea of freedom and fatherland is very different from ours.
And it's not just a matter of attitude. It's Entropy. Systems run out of gas. Roads crumble, wells run dry, global magnetism weakens, climate cools, chromosome pairs disintegrate.
Hey Fritz! This is one of the most thoughtful things anyone's left here, so let me earn it. Fair quibble on unions… as a New Jersey native I know all of the great things about them and I know all of the bad things about them…. The representation was the point, not the institution,… and those aren't the same. And your line between "the government" and "my country, meaning the people and the land" is exactly right. I was waiting for someone to pick up on this because I actually made sure that these two got conflated on purpose, because if you can make people feel like criticizing the machine is betraying the country… they'll defend the machine to protect the country.
I'd probably split from you on the entropy part. Roads crumbling and wells running dry aren't physics, they're budgets. A road doesn't decay because the universe demands it…. It's man-made … It decays because someone chose not to fund the maintenance and spent it elsew I get what you're saying, and I know it will happen with age, but when we say entropy… we do the politicians dirty work for them in their crusade to not represent us… calling that entropy lets the people who made the choice off the hook, because you can't indict thermodynamics. The road ending for heroes and villains alike is true for men. It is not true for nations, and that's the one place I need the distinction to hold, because if decline is just weather then there's nothing to fix and no one to hold accountable. I'd rather it be a choice. A choice can be made differently. Really glad you're reading this closely.
Rxan. The Entropy thing is a hard argument to make to a younger crowd. I would’ve hated it too as a young man. It sounds fatalist and weak and old—which it is. But it also has some foundation in fact.
When I review the last twenty years of articles, books, videos and seminars about the Romans, Greeks, Egyptians, Parthians, Hittites, Israelites, Persians, Assyrians, and Babylonians, the conclusions as to their shelf-life vary by author, but in aggregate the takeaway is the same.
They went away because it was time.
Barbarians at the gates, mini-ice-age, volcanos, trade route collapse due to invasion by an unknown group nobody’s accounted for, religious upheaval, black plague, boll weevil, massive inflation, wars of attrition. Sum them up and the overall impression is that they gave it what they had till they didn’t have any more.
It’s like the human body with the flu. I’ve survived bugs and awful colds, the rockin’ pneumonia and the boogie-woogie flu. Sometimes I was in bed for a week and not right for another week, but then I was back. My thirty year old body was proof against the little bacteria or viruses.
Next time I get a flu or a major case of kickassinosis, my ability to bounce back is in question. That’s not necessarily a flaw in the system. My heart or pancreas was not an inferior model. The thing just reached way past its termination date and decided to go out with a whimper, not a bang.
Yeah, you could blame my doctor for not putting me on ropeadopeacin when I was twenty three or my mother for not marrying a wealthy transhumanist who has three cyborg bodies saved up for retirement, but the bottom line is that my time will be up.
Great civilizations have traditionally lasted a few centuries. They made have had their eras like the Persians and Egyptians, but they’re living on fumes after that.
Our present technology complicates the picture now. Look at how the Tech Bros are building bunkers in New Zealand and Argentina, and spending money they don’t have on the data centers in the middle east and even going so far as inventing a fake Mars mission just so they’ll have a place to hang out for a few years while the radiation on Earth dies down. There’s a flurry of suicidal activity that resembles a moth to a flame. The moth knows it’s close to a flame, but it does this dance of death anyway, because that’s what moths do.
Many geneticists argue that the deleterious accumulation of mutations is leading to a general deterioration of the gene pool. This is not a majority view, but a growing one.
No one wants to think that the race which spawned Alexander the Great and Taylor Swift could be just a tiny piece of a geological cycle that could easily end in an asteroid collision or a global flood or a giant sunspot. But the lesson of the universe, so far, is that Stuff Happens.
The day this country started declining was the JFK assassination. The deep state killed him, lied about it and fleeced the American people. Psychopaths, like LBJ, took the helm. They brought us the welfare state, Vietnam and being joined at the hip with a foreign nation, Israel. Years later, add psychopaths like Bill Gates and Anthony Fauci and the perpetrators in the Epstein files to the mix. No one is held accountable or goes to prison. No wonder we’re demoralized. We need to find a successful way to fight back. Start with reliance on God and Jesus Christ.
Appreciate you, BSmith. The accountability vacuum you're describing is real and it's the whole reason I wrote the piece. My one push: the villain list is the trap. If it were just a few psychopaths you could remove them and fix it, but the system would just make more.
That's the scarier truth. Go after the mechanism, not the names, and you can actually land a punch. And on the Israel point, the policy is fair game, but "a foreign nation secretly running us" is the oldest story there is and it only makes the real critique easier to dismiss.
The best remedy to ease what ails this country isn’t the performative shouts at the opposing party. It’s civic engagement, and it starts small. Attend the meetings when your local board of trustees holds them. Watch them. Listen to them. Ask questions.
Always vote in every single election, not just mid-terms or presidential elections. Vote locally. Not familiar with the issues on the state
ballot because you don’t listen to the spin? Your League of Women Voters has a guide that out lines the issues in plain language that is strictly non-partisan. https://www.lwv.org
Got a gripe you want one of your congresscritters to address? Use an app like 5calls which outlines some major issues and gives you the names and office numbers of your congresscritters and even provides you with a script if you’re uncomfortable rattling off your irritations without the profanity-laced invective that prevents you from being taken seriously. I call mine daily. Some of them send me straight to voicemail and sometimes I get a staffer. Always give them you name and address so they can verify you as a constituent.
Don’t just worry or protest. Take part in the clunky system the way it is to make your voices heard.
The system relies on apathy and the fact that we’re easily overwhelmed. Take back just a little bit of the energy you’ve been hurling at the participants in the other party. We outnumber the politicians and the billionaires. Demand better.
This post should get the people from both sides of the aisle talking... I want to hear staunch conservatives and liberals....
Democracy isn’t a spectator sport. You as a citizen must do your part, vote, and participate. We as a nation must make it possible for every citizen to do so, as SCOTUS doesn’t respect the right of every citizen’s rights to vote and to have equal representation. Neither does our current president.
Exactly right, and the part that always gets buried is your second half. Participation only works if the system actually lets it land. When representation itself is tilted, telling people to just vote harder is like telling someone to bail faster on a boat with a hole in it. Both things are true at once: show up, and fix the hole. Appreciate you setting the tone here.
The voting part is what people from both parties need to hammer home first.. The fact that we had an election between somebody that was anointed without a vote and Donald Trump in 2024 is a very bad sign for democracy in general
Excellent! You reminded me of thoughts and feelings I’ve had for a verrry long time. The feeling that America has gradually been investing in itself less and less. Schools, research, the lower class etc.
I had a realization, a long time ago. There could be an Einstein born every year. But if he’s born poverty and crime infested neighborhoods he’ll never get the opportunity to fulfill his destiny.
I used to feel proud to be an American but now it’s more an embarrassment when I think of how petty and selfish and inconsistent we appear to the world these days. Thank you DLT!
The Einstein point is the entire essay in one image. There's a genius born every year in a zip code we've quietly decided not to invest in, and we lose that person, and then we call it their failure instead of ours. On the embarrassment, I feel it too, but one reframe: shame means the standard is still alive in you. The dangerous day isn't the one where you feel embarrassed. It's the one where you stop. That feeling is the receipt not being fully torn up yet. Thank you for this.
I think we’re back to the plutocracy wanting the money for themselves and the right wing convinced that the money will be stolen or wasted. Funny thing is that the money IS being stolen by the plutocracy.
Here we are back in the circle we keep pointing out. While we’re fighting each the wealth keeps going up to the 1%. WAKE UP AMERICA!
You just said the whole thesis in three sentences. That's the loop exactly: they keep us fighting over whether the money will be stolen or wasted, while the actual theft happens quietly, in the other direction, the entire time. The genius of it is that both sides are half right, which is what keeps the argument alive forever. The right isn't wrong that money gets stolen. They've just been handed the wrong thief. Point the anger up instead of sideways and suddenly a lot of people who "disagree" turn out to want the same thing.
What do you think? I just thought that a final piece of my slow motion coup could be predicting the next steps. Maybe that would help increase awareness and attention to the issue?
What are we willing to build?
Who are we finally willing to hold accountable?
And when are we going to admit that voting once every four years, choosing the lesser of two evils, then disappearing until the next election isn’t civic engagement?
It’s civic absenteeism.
A democracy isn’t something you inherit.
It’s something you maintain.
Or someone else will maintain it for you.
Pride isn’t a feeling.
It’s a receipt.
The only question left...
...is whether we’re willing to pay for the next one.
🔥 🔥 🔥 🔥 🔥 🔥 🔥 🔥 🔥 🔥 🔥
"Civic absenteeism" is better than anything in the actual piece. I'm stealing it.... Wait a minute I don't have to steal it.. it's mine!!!
You took the receipt line and finished the thought I was circling around... you don't inherit it, you maintain it, or someone maintains it for you, and lately someone has. And that last line, whether we're willing to pay for the next one, is the whole ballgame. Thank you for reading it this closely.
Phewwww!!! This Rxan can really talk some shit, huh? Run for office already. J/K. You're great I read you whenever I want to get motivated.
Ha, appreciate you. The run for office thing is the trap, though. The whole argument is that we keep waiting for a guy on a horse to come fix it, and that waiting is exactly how they keep it. I think I'm more useful out here saying it plainly than I'd ever be in there. Glad it lights a fire. That's the entire point of writing it.
I was on the tail end of the greatest generation and ready to leave college to fight in Vietnam.. but before taking such a big step, I thought I should do some research. Nobody could give me a coherent explanation of the purpose of the war. In fact, it disgust me what this country does to people around the world - killing people by the millions for no particular reason except there’s money in it. I got a fellowship to go to grad school in mathematics but the draft board said no. If you go to graduate school, we will draft you so fast, your head will spin so I chickened out and never got the PhD. In retrospect I think I could’ve beaten the draft board in court.
Steve, this is the piece I wish I'd written. You did the thing almost nobody did: you stopped and asked what it was actually for, and when no honest answer came back, you noticed. That instinct is the whole ballgame, and it cost you a PhD to keep it. I don't think you chickened out. I think you refused, and the machine punished the refusal, which is a different thing entirely and the more honorable one.
And the part that should haunt everyone is that you couldn't get a coherent purpose out of anyone, because there wasn't one that could be said out loud. That's the tell, every time. When the reason can't survive being spoken plainly, the reason is money. Thank you for being here and for telling it straight.
Absolute fact, all the way around. (Minor quibble: I don't think unions were great overall, but the idea of more worker representation was a good idea). My idea of "my country" might be different than yours. I've always despised the government, and it's gotten much more despicable so I've adjusted gradually. "My country" is the people (at least in my neighborhood), and the magnificence of the actual real estate. Yeah, I don't identify with three quarters of the people either.
Video killed the radio star. The internet killed Ozzie and Harriet. Darwin killed Manifest Destiny. All of that killing adds up.
The DSA people and TDS crowd should probably lighten up a little though. The rest of the world isn't doing that much better than us. Europe is hip deep in the same moral sewer America's living in now. The people with a purpose and an agenda and the discipline we had in World War Two are living in China and Singapore. But their idea of freedom and fatherland is very different from ours.
And it's not just a matter of attitude. It's Entropy. Systems run out of gas. Roads crumble, wells run dry, global magnetism weakens, climate cools, chromosome pairs disintegrate.
The road ends, for heroes and villains alike.
Hey Fritz! This is one of the most thoughtful things anyone's left here, so let me earn it. Fair quibble on unions… as a New Jersey native I know all of the great things about them and I know all of the bad things about them…. The representation was the point, not the institution,… and those aren't the same. And your line between "the government" and "my country, meaning the people and the land" is exactly right. I was waiting for someone to pick up on this because I actually made sure that these two got conflated on purpose, because if you can make people feel like criticizing the machine is betraying the country… they'll defend the machine to protect the country.
I'd probably split from you on the entropy part. Roads crumbling and wells running dry aren't physics, they're budgets. A road doesn't decay because the universe demands it…. It's man-made … It decays because someone chose not to fund the maintenance and spent it elsew I get what you're saying, and I know it will happen with age, but when we say entropy… we do the politicians dirty work for them in their crusade to not represent us… calling that entropy lets the people who made the choice off the hook, because you can't indict thermodynamics. The road ending for heroes and villains alike is true for men. It is not true for nations, and that's the one place I need the distinction to hold, because if decline is just weather then there's nothing to fix and no one to hold accountable. I'd rather it be a choice. A choice can be made differently. Really glad you're reading this closely.
Rxan. The Entropy thing is a hard argument to make to a younger crowd. I would’ve hated it too as a young man. It sounds fatalist and weak and old—which it is. But it also has some foundation in fact.
When I review the last twenty years of articles, books, videos and seminars about the Romans, Greeks, Egyptians, Parthians, Hittites, Israelites, Persians, Assyrians, and Babylonians, the conclusions as to their shelf-life vary by author, but in aggregate the takeaway is the same.
They went away because it was time.
Barbarians at the gates, mini-ice-age, volcanos, trade route collapse due to invasion by an unknown group nobody’s accounted for, religious upheaval, black plague, boll weevil, massive inflation, wars of attrition. Sum them up and the overall impression is that they gave it what they had till they didn’t have any more.
It’s like the human body with the flu. I’ve survived bugs and awful colds, the rockin’ pneumonia and the boogie-woogie flu. Sometimes I was in bed for a week and not right for another week, but then I was back. My thirty year old body was proof against the little bacteria or viruses.
Next time I get a flu or a major case of kickassinosis, my ability to bounce back is in question. That’s not necessarily a flaw in the system. My heart or pancreas was not an inferior model. The thing just reached way past its termination date and decided to go out with a whimper, not a bang.
Yeah, you could blame my doctor for not putting me on ropeadopeacin when I was twenty three or my mother for not marrying a wealthy transhumanist who has three cyborg bodies saved up for retirement, but the bottom line is that my time will be up.
Great civilizations have traditionally lasted a few centuries. They made have had their eras like the Persians and Egyptians, but they’re living on fumes after that.
Our present technology complicates the picture now. Look at how the Tech Bros are building bunkers in New Zealand and Argentina, and spending money they don’t have on the data centers in the middle east and even going so far as inventing a fake Mars mission just so they’ll have a place to hang out for a few years while the radiation on Earth dies down. There’s a flurry of suicidal activity that resembles a moth to a flame. The moth knows it’s close to a flame, but it does this dance of death anyway, because that’s what moths do.
Many geneticists argue that the deleterious accumulation of mutations is leading to a general deterioration of the gene pool. This is not a majority view, but a growing one.
No one wants to think that the race which spawned Alexander the Great and Taylor Swift could be just a tiny piece of a geological cycle that could easily end in an asteroid collision or a global flood or a giant sunspot. But the lesson of the universe, so far, is that Stuff Happens.
Until it doesn’t.
The day this country started declining was the JFK assassination. The deep state killed him, lied about it and fleeced the American people. Psychopaths, like LBJ, took the helm. They brought us the welfare state, Vietnam and being joined at the hip with a foreign nation, Israel. Years later, add psychopaths like Bill Gates and Anthony Fauci and the perpetrators in the Epstein files to the mix. No one is held accountable or goes to prison. No wonder we’re demoralized. We need to find a successful way to fight back. Start with reliance on God and Jesus Christ.
Appreciate you, BSmith. The accountability vacuum you're describing is real and it's the whole reason I wrote the piece. My one push: the villain list is the trap. If it were just a few psychopaths you could remove them and fix it, but the system would just make more.
That's the scarier truth. Go after the mechanism, not the names, and you can actually land a punch. And on the Israel point, the policy is fair game, but "a foreign nation secretly running us" is the oldest story there is and it only makes the real critique easier to dismiss.
We will rebuild.
Or we will roll up & die.
The best remedy to ease what ails this country isn’t the performative shouts at the opposing party. It’s civic engagement, and it starts small. Attend the meetings when your local board of trustees holds them. Watch them. Listen to them. Ask questions.
Always vote in every single election, not just mid-terms or presidential elections. Vote locally. Not familiar with the issues on the state
ballot because you don’t listen to the spin? Your League of Women Voters has a guide that out lines the issues in plain language that is strictly non-partisan. https://www.lwv.org
Got a gripe you want one of your congresscritters to address? Use an app like 5calls which outlines some major issues and gives you the names and office numbers of your congresscritters and even provides you with a script if you’re uncomfortable rattling off your irritations without the profanity-laced invective that prevents you from being taken seriously. I call mine daily. Some of them send me straight to voicemail and sometimes I get a staffer. Always give them you name and address so they can verify you as a constituent.
Don’t just worry or protest. Take part in the clunky system the way it is to make your voices heard.
The system relies on apathy and the fact that we’re easily overwhelmed. Take back just a little bit of the energy you’ve been hurling at the participants in the other party. We outnumber the politicians and the billionaires. Demand better.