One Lie Too Many

Musing Mother posted a pithy piece about the dumbing down of the American population and the lies we live with on a daily basis. I couldn't agree more. I see a very bleak future for the US, especially since history tends to repeat itself. Look at all the great and powerful civilizations that have crumbled from the weight of their own avarice and arrogance.

The Incas were conquered but the Mayans, supposedly a greater and more accomplished group, simply disappeared. Rome wasn't built in a day and it didn't die in a day. It just slowly eroded with power struggles, revolts, leadership difficulties and the weight of self-indulgence. Even the British Empire is no longer the world-wide, powerful entity it once was. The USSR crumbled like that wall, beaten down by simple economics and the mistakes of past despots.

Rome was so magnificent in its day as was ancient Egypt, enlightened Greece and all the other great empires and nations that are only shadows of themselves. While we crawl through various ruins on a tour and marvel at how accomplished these people were, we fail to look at them and see our own future. We still see ourselves as leaders of the free world and that is fast becoming major hogwash.

We have a literally crumbling infrastructure, a decimated economy, an educational system that is a slave to test scores and fails to teach independent thinking skills and a system of self-indulgent lies as the foundation for many of our most cherished institutions. And yet the Ugly American lives and shoot his mouth off with impunity.

We are self-indulgent, self-entitled and would rather let someone else think for us than to think for ourselves. If anyone dares to challenge the status quo on any level, they are dismissed as members of the lunatic fringe, yet we don't dare challenge the idea that Capitalism is the only way to fly. We worship the nuclear family, yet think nothing of destroying families to create that dysfunctional ideal. We have a constitution based on the separation of church and state, yet, in 1950, we went from "E Pluribus Unum" (one out of many) to "In God We Trust." (Anyone see a little bit of church invading state, here?)

Those of us who have suffered from the lies of adoption, mothers and adult children and our families, are seen as the losers, the lunatic fringe, the bitter and the ungrateful for challenging one of the biggest, legalized, government and church-sanctioned lies going, that of the beneficial, warm , fuzzy idea of adoption. While the human wreckage caused by this lie is all around, in every community and every neighborhood, the general population of the US refuses to take off the blinders and the rose-colored glasses and LOOK AT IT.

We challenge the lies and are called the liars. We talk of our loss and are told we did it to ourselves. We question the ethics and are looked at in shock. Adoption is the golden calf and Moses can't scream loud enough over the worshipers. The only thing we have going for us is the truth and our voices.  That sounds great until you try putting that up against money and corrupt power. Even with laws in place against discrimination, this nation discriminates against people every day.

I don't have a crystal ball and I don't claim to have precognitive powers. But I know we learn our greatest lessons about who we are and where we are going from our own, human pasts. If I am a decently educated student of History, then I have to say that what was a possibility has become a probability. What with our disregard for the natural wonders of our nation, our discrimination against single mothers, adult adoptees, gays and lesbians, the poor and aged,  the non-religious, we are on that slippery slope.

And the great US of A is going down in a whimper of lies.