In this age of economic and digital warfare it is unlikely that New York will be physically sacked as was Rome in 410, yet I feel a strong sense of déja vu watching the 20th Century’s last Superpower, in which I live, devolve into a nation of debtors, criminals and extremists.
Need I say more?
One need only look at the state leading the race to our decline to realize that imperial America is rapidly becoming an important, but not supreme power.
The newly elected (by about 25% of the electorate) of Florida is so blindly anti-everthing (except his own power and wealth) that he refuses $2.4 billion of federal money for a project that will create jobs and invigorate a large section of “his” state’s economy.
This is the state leading the country in a charge to the bottom of the world’s lists of infant mortality, broadband penetration, knowledge and competence of its citizenry, to name just a few of the areas in which we compare poorly to even so called “third world” countries.
Spend a few weeks in and around the state capitol, Tallahassee, and you’ll realize that we have our own third-world nation within our borders.
At the same time we smugly violate international laws governing the treatment of prisoners.We incarcerate a higher percentage of our people than any of our peer nations and many nations we consider backwards or repressive. We routinely sell elections to the highest bidder, now allowing those bidders to be corporations. We refuse to regulate the distribution of highly addictive and abused pain killers on the grounds that it would be an “invasion of privacy.” And soon, while stripping the rights of public employees to organize and negotiate their working conditions we’ll allow guns to be openly carried on college campuses.
Doesn’t anyone see the connection between a Governor who was the co-founder and head of the company (Columbia/HCA) which paid the highest Medicare fine in the history of the US after pleading guilty to massive fraud charges and his refusal to regulate prescription pain killers? Florida is the nation’s, if not the world’s, epicenter of the illegal prescription drug trade. It affects not only Floridians but the people of countless towns and cities along the pipeline connecting south Florida to the Appalachians. One has to wonder how much of the profits of this deadly trade make their way into the personal wealth of prominent Floridians.
If we don’t wake up soon and recognize the folly of “sustained economic growth”, the recklessness of denial of global climate change and our contribution to it, the absurdity of our insatiable addiction to fossil fuels and the illusion that we are all powerful and unconquerable we may well end up like poor Honorius of Rome, more relieved that his favorite hen was still alive than worried about the empire crashing down around him.
