Can the United States Sustain Itself?

Mr. Donald Gilmore is a well known historian and novelist who wrote the groundbreaking book The Civil War on the Missouri/Kansas Border and other works. His books have shed new light on the American venue from the point of view of a Missouri Partisan. As a response and corollary to the recent writings of Mr. Thomas Moore of the Southern National Congress, Gilmore seeks to clarify the situation which the United States finds itself in. dsr

Donald Gilmore

Sometimes present, specific problems can indicate fundamental flaws in our society at large. Take for instance the present oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, which seems to befuddle our government and business community. We don’t seem at this time to be knowledgeable enough and sophisticated enough to solve this single national problem.

We have oil spilling into the water spoiling a billion dollar tourist industry, ruining the coastal ecology of the American Gulf South, and ravaging a second-to-none fishing industry. And for over forty days, the President of the United States dithered. Finally, his only response was to say in vulgar fashion that he would “kick some butts,” once individuals living along the coast area told him the precise “butts” to kick and why. Now, isn’t that a miserable response for a leader of a great nation to admit to, that he doesn’t know what to do, with all the best minds available to him, that he would just turn to those beset by this horrendous problem for an answer. That’s not even a grade-school-level solution.

Obama even designated a U.S. Navy admiral to oversee the problem, only to be told by the admiral that the people who created the mess, BP, were the only ones capable of fixing it. Isn’t that sort of like assigning the fox to resolve problems of predatory foxes in the hen house? Is anyone awake in Washington? Hello!

It should have been obvious from the start that some of the best minds, engineering and scientific, on our planet should have been consulted for the best advice as to the procedures to be followed to resolve this catastrophe. But left to its own devices, BP began spilling millions of gallons of dispersants on the oils slicks, informing us that that would alleviate the problem.

What happened, which has not been properly reported by the way, is that the dispersant did just what its description promised it would do: it “broke up and scattered in different directions” the oil. What was the result of this scattering? Within days, three different universities discovered huge lenses or layers of oil at various depths, to very deep, in the Gulf of Mexico. When BP was informed by the news media of this discovery, their answer was: “Our information tells us that this is not so.” Apparently, BP is not scientifically oriented in its correction of the oil problem or they would have acknowledged a scientifically discovered fact. And the men in Washington were asleep also.

What was the effect of this dispersion? On public TV tonight, June 8, the son of Jacques Cousteau, like his father an oceanographer and ecologist, raged at the ignorance of BP’s tactic of employing the dispersants, considering they had absolutely no knowledge of what the impact of using this dispersant would be. Now, with the oil dispersed, floating at various levels in the ocean, it cannot be skimmed off into barges, cannot be retrieved in any practical way, and as Cousteau maintained, will now travel all over the world under the surf causing incalculable damage to the ocean and the denizens therein—everywhere, the entire watery world!

So the point of this little essay so far is that our government and our leaders are becoming incapable of meeting the demands of a very large nation with a multiplicity of concerns. All our present President was able to do in the face of this tragedy was first, to remain silent for over forty days, and then, when activated by criticism from enemies and friends, to point fingers and give pretty speeches, which obviously have had no affect on the problem at any level.

Our country, like many nations and empires of the past is approaching a size and complexity where it appears to be unable to cope with the military, political, economic, and business structures of which it is composed. What we should increasingly realize is that great nations and empires are transient and have a limited longevity, like the Assyrian empire, the Macedonian empire, the Roman Empire, Louis XIV, the British Empire, the Russian Communist empire, and Hitler’s short-lived national socialist demi-empire.

Obviously, all of the above no longer exist, with only our present American and Chinese nations remaining, large, still intact, and ambitious to emulate them. Nearly all of the empires mentioned collapsed because of inadequate infrastructures and public debt caused by their overweening national ambitions. All these grand systems became so unwieldy and dysfunctional that they collapsed of their own weight, like our nation shall.

Excessive, burgeoning, weighty government spending for various supposed entitlements (i.e., bribes) will sink this ship of state like all those other grand states. The Roman Empire lasted almost 800 years before its practice of using foreign officers and men in its armies instead of its own people, spending beyond its ability to sustain itself, and allowing its public morality to rot destroyed it. The United States will never last half as long.

Just as Russia dissolved through the predictable failure of a Marxist economy, we will collapse through a similar socialist economic agenda that cannot be supported with the present system of taxation and public expectations. Like Hitler’s empire, bolstered by a propaganda network second to none, we have propped up our governments with a liberal media that is every bit as virulent and effective as Joseph Goebbels’ Nazi communication media.

But the seeds of the destruction of this American empire are already sown. The mainstay of the liberal media, the conventional TV networks, have been pre-empted by the new cable TV networks; the newspaper industry is crumbling as I write; and the growing independence of the Internet is undercutting and enervating the flow of traditional liberal propaganda. The United States as we have known it will likely become only a memory, perhaps as early as forty year from today, all the result of a socialist program in this country that became too ambitious, too costly, too centered on too few people, and this will lead ultimately to the social and economic disintegration of this nation.

When this occurs, will the United States, like Russia, recognize it has had its day, concluded its long, socialist adventure, and now must let the various broken pieces of a nation too large to control and function go their own way? Or will this nation, like it did during the Civil War, begin a monstrous blood bath using the federal forces at its disposal.  Whose wisdom will guide us; George Soros and Karl Marx or Washington, Jefferson and Calhoun? These are questions we need to contemplate.
Donald Gilmore

Books of interest by Mr. Gilmore:

The Civil War on the Missouri Kansas Border

Riding Vengeance with the James Gang