American Decay
There's a phenomenon in the business of space flight known as orbital decay.
Most of what humans put into orbit around the Earth orbits a couple hundred miles up from the ground. While the "official" edge of the Earth's atmosphere is 62 miles up (that's 100 kilometers - a conveniently round number), the reality is that atmospheric molecules extend much higher, and they create drag for all those satellites whizzing around the planet at 17,000 mph. Practically speaking, orbital decay exists all the way up to about 1000 miles altitude, meaning that anything below that will slow down over time, and eventually burn up in the atmosphere. Rather than travel in a circle or ellipse, satellites, in effect, spiral downward. Slowly at first, but more rapidly as they sink deeper into the atmosphere.
Unless something is done to counter the effects.
I cannot help but feel that America is in the same sort of spiraling decay right now. Decades of increasing domestic rancor, not coincidentally coupled with a growing government, feel in retrospect like a downward spiral.
An accelerating one, at that. The government's response to the COVID pandemic put things into overdrive. The massive printing of money and the sledgehammer lockdowns created negative effects that will ripple for years, perhaps decades. A generation of children will likely carry lasting emotional "scars" from the disruptions, forever-masks, and so on. The politicization of remediations and treatments exacerbated the red-blue acrimony, and set neighbors against each other.
This on top of an Aesop's grasshopper attitude toward the the ticking time bombs that are Social Security and Medicare, the normalizing of trillion dollar budget deficits, a continuing erosion of individual rights, the abandonment of the principle of equality, and the deliberate exaggeration of an "us-vs-them" attitude toward all matters of public policy.
Now, the politicians who promised us "normal" appear to be actively trying to accelerate that spiral rather than counteract it. Inflation, always a monetary phenomenon, is being blamed on everything but the obvious: the massive growth of the money supply.
Runaway spending is of no concern to anyone in power, and they have the unmitigated audacity to demand more of it.
The unfathomable national debt - we are a few points of interest away from popping like a drogue parachute - is similarly of no concern.
The southern border doesn't exist, and the promise of government largesse is serving as a "come on in, the OPM is free!" neon sign that'd put Vegas to shame. The arrivals then get flown, hush-hush and under cover of night to random airports across the country, to disperse as they will.
The nation's energy policy is, to put it mildly, insane. Biden would rather buy petroleum from a Venezuelan dictator and beg murderous, repressive Middle Eastern kingdoms to pump more oil than allow domestic producers to address the problem.
The incompetence of the Afghanistan withdrawal is absolutely stunning and an eternal-hellfire-damnation indictment of the notion that we are being led by the Best-and-Brightest.
The inept clowns at the top of this all look down upon us with haughty disdain, as they deliberately impose hardship after hardship upon us, "for our own good." It really does seem like they're choosing every path of greater pain and privation, rather than working to make our lives easier and better.
Our geopolitical rivals witness this decay with glee, exploiting it at every turn.
The unwashed masses see it as well, especially now that inflation and other realities are hammering them.
Our leaders, however, suffer from several impediments that keep them from correcting themselves:
Their "base," the core of voices that they pay most attention to, tends to be wealthy and (I loathe the word, but it's apt) privileged. As with the COVID lockdowns, inflation and other degradations are minor inconveniences. Stephen Colbert tells us he'd pay $15 a gallon for gas because he drives a Tesla, and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg offers a disdainful "let them eat cake" sniff, by telling us that buying an electric car means you "never have to worry about gas prices again." Until, of course, electricity prices "necessarily skyrocket," as Obama told us to expect back in 2008. The voices guiding the Party don't feel the average citizen's pain (pain they believe will corral us into the behaviors they prefer), and the advent of "green" has provided a moral sop to these sadists.
Their left wing has yapped its way into policy dominance. So, even though our dependence on foreign oil hampers our strategic alternatives regarding Russia's aggression, the Party rejects the obvious remedy.
They suffer from a "win the fight rather than get it right" stubbornness, wherein they'd rather the house burn down than admit splashing water o a grease fire is a bad idea. Only in government does a policy that didn't work get amplified rather than reversed.
They also fall prey to the "never admit an error, and never apologize" pugnaciousness that the rabid partisans at the edges of the political spectrum applaud and cheer for.
At the very top of it all, we have a President in rather obvious mental decline, a Vice President who hasn't shown the competence required of a floor-mopper, and leaders of the two houses of Congress who care only about naked partisan power and bludgeoning the opposition.
The captain is dithering and doddering, the first mate is a cackling fool, and the senior officers care more about bending the crew to their will than about the ship itself.
In eight months, it is highly probable that the Democrats will lose Congress to the Republicans. Given that I expect Biden to follow in Obama's intransigent footsteps rather than heed the voters' message and course-correct, the nation's politics will gridlock, and the spiral will continue.
Here's the thing about orbital decay. Adjust for it early enough, and you don't need to do very much. Wait until you've dropped down the spiral a long way, though, and it takes a lot more energy to restore the orbit.
We're two and a half years, at least, before we can expect any corrections, and that's assuming someone other the Untethered Orange Id (sorry, Trump fans, he's not the answer) manages to ascend to the White House. The Terrible Tetrad currently running things is only going to continue making things worse, and our living standards (not to mention our liberties) will continue to degrade.
It's already a rough ride, and the road ahead is even worse.
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Yours in liberty,
Peter.