Well, after holding on to this thing for two whole years without doing anything with it, I figured I might as well put it to use. So yeah, this be my first post. And as such, it won’t be much, considering that I’m writing this at 1:10 in the morning, and despite my night owl ways, I have an early engagement later, so have to hit the sack. But I might as well put something valuable here.
There’s a website I check out every now and then, run by a guy who calls himself Ishkur. He’s mostly known to be a guy who comments on raver culture, but he also happens to be an interesting commentator on common affairs. Take the last paragraph of his latest article here:
“No Empire wants to admit that its once proud civilization is at an ebb. Each one firmly believes that without it to lead the way, humanity itself is doomed. Yet, somehow life managed without it. No Empire lasts forever, and subsequent Empires often supersede it with more glorious riches, more advanced standards of living, and more efficient armies. No Empire holds a privileged position on humanity; no Empire is a caretaker for the human race. This is something every Empire must come to grips with and accept as its power diminishes.”
Yes; for those of you astute enough to figure this out, he’s talking about the apparent fall of the US. With all the talk about the financial crisis, public unrest, and polarized government political shenanigans, this is a topic that I’m sure is going to come up more than once. While I could go into the particulars, it IS late at night, and besides, the guy brings up some good points in his article anyway, which I encourage you to go and read (his site is: here , and the article is called “Declining stages of an Empire“). So instead, I’d rather touch on the point that’s brought up in the part I quoted; that no empire has a claim on the advancement, or safeguarding, of humanity at large.
It’s an interesting thing to consider. How many times are we constantly told that the US is the leader of the free world, that it’s the greatest nation on the planet, that it is the ultimate champion of freedom? It’s to the point where those phrases are pretty much cliche, and to say anything to the contrary can get you a whole lot of dirty looks, at the very least. But just how true is this? Are we really expected to believe that if the US loses it’s standing as number one, that humanity will go down the tubes, that what all humans on Earth will have to look forward to us is a dark age of pain and suffering? Maybe… who knows what time will bring. But let’s be realistic: there are now many other nations containing citizens that enjoy things that we here in the States don’t get… namely less poverty, less crime, greater access to health care, and governments that regard their citizens with less contempt than ours does. Surely if those nations have a chance to claim a stronger standing in the world, wouldn’t that fare better for the rest of us? Sure, I’m not going to pretend that there’s a perfect nation out there: every country has its problems that need to be rectified. But that’s also the point; in saying that all nations have problems, that includes our own, and ours is not so close to perfection, nor does it have so strong a monopoly on the fate of human development, that if it falls humanity itself is doomed to suffer a dark fate, where we start acting like neanderthals.
Of course, this isn’t to say that if the economy and our political process keeps going the way it’s going, that we don’t have some rough times ahead of us. But now isn’t the time for us to lose our heads either; this is the time when we need to realize how we got in this mess, and figure out how to ride out the storm. And when I saw ‘we’ I mean the regular citizens of the US; it should be clear that those who hold the reigns aren’t exactly doing that right now. If we are going to whether whatever the future has in store for us, it would be best to have our minds firmly set in reality, and to not be putting on airs concerning our standing with all of humanity. In fact, having a more humble attitude tends to be what makes others put people on pedestals anyway.
