Soical Fabric, Undone
We now live in a time when we must admit that there is no longer a social fabric or contract. It has been ripped apart, gleefully thrown aside, its remnants lit on fire to the joy of a crowd with spittle flicking from roaring mouths in maniacal happiness.
We have moved on from the idea of "e pluribus unum," and plunged straightway into "all for me, none for thee." The level of contempt in American society that people hold for one another is astonishing, appalling and depressing. We no longer seek to elect people to lead, but to obey, and what's more, obey others who did not even vote for them at all. Our politicians are not driven by public service but by systematically creating public servitude to corporations and banks, two of the worst actors in American life who have done more to show they are for the ruin of all in order to make money.
We live in a time when there is very little demonstrable truth because you are supposed to show "both sides," as if the idea that two and two equalling five is just as compelling and true as four. We live in a time when ignorance is education, when you really don't need to know something about anything, but just believe what is being told to you and when questioned, tell your interlocutor to "look it up," because we are now incapable of arguing a point on its own merit. In fact, we have started to despise knowledge itself, preferring to turn to sources that are sympathetic to our biases. You can no longer be a free thinker in this society because that makes you a liberal suspect. Knowledge is liberalism, liberalism is evil, evil must be fought and rejected. We've gone past the idea that you can educate people on anything because we have an entire generation that is being conditioned to distrust all forms of knowledge that don't come from AM airwaves. These people are being made to hate their own countrymen because others don't share the same beliefs. This is considered a good thing nowadays.
People are being needlessly polarized by the elitists of the right-wing to stamp down anything resembling what used to be the social fabric. Helping others is a weakness, a disease that needs to be resisted. You can imagine the notorious Julius Streicher smiling from hell, seeing that his legacy of defamation and vilification is being applied to the weakest members of society. All we need is an updated version of "The Eternal Jew" transmogrified into "The Eternal Liberal," depicting the enemies of conservatism as a literal plague of rats.
Americans used to pride themselves on the nation's scientific prowess. Now, it's just another enemy to be distrusted. In order to prevent knowledge, one must undercut it, question it beyond the bounds of normal critique and make it a hostage to puny political sentiments. You can have an elected congressman actually refer to the Centers for Disease Control as doing "junk science" when it comes to the study of the effects of gun violence, without any sense of shame or irony. When you can undermine faith in a science-based organization that is a medical leader in the protection of the populace from all sorts of threats, why bother listening to them at all about anything else? The CDC can't do junk science on one subject, but perform admirably and should be believed on others. But again, this isn't about finding answers to problems, this is about decrying (and in some cases, defunding) knowledge. To control knowledge is to control people, and if you eliminate any number of things that can educate people, you make them more susceptible to adopting your views.
Our social fabric is gone; our social contract is history. We do not seek to help one another but to harm one another. We have entire media outlets dedicated to the daily pushing of this agenda, to inculcate hatred for one another in much the same way Europeans tore into one another over religion. We have nothing uniting us at all because we have entered that long period of decline. Indeed, America is in decline and the ones who are pushing it further and further are the ones who claim to be doing the reverse. Our society is being weakened because we are being told on a daily basis to devalue one another. There is no truth anymore in our society. We have politicians who are openly rigging elections which defies any semblance to traditional American values of fairness, but no one is angry about it because they've been led to believe it's a good thing. What we have is a reversal of values, the de-evolution of our basic morals. We claim to be a Christian nation, but have told the widow and the orphan, "You have only to blame yourself, so don't ask for any help." Quite frankly, who cares about gay marriage or even abortion if the fundamental thread of the social fabric is being undone with these two issues used a red herring to distract us from the true destroyers of our values? We are being induced to hate, hate and hate some more. We are encouraged to distrust one another and question the motives of our fellow countrymen, and pledge loyalty to abstract political positions rather than to our communities.
If John F. Kennedy were alive, he'd be excoriated for asking "not what your country can do for you, but what can you do for your country" as wanting to make citizens into government slaves. That is how bad it's gotten in this country, and that's how civilizations start their fall: by rotting from within.