This post is a must read for anyone who is deeply concerned that America and the world are headed in the wrong direction. If you’re unaware of the unraveling of the fabric of global society then I beg you to continue reading. Hopefully you will be enlightened as to the state of our terrestrial ball. If your position is that my assessment is wrapped in hyperbole then be damned by your attitude and I’ll pray for you anyway.
Roger Cohen wrote a poignant editorial in the New York Times entitled, The Great Unraveling. It is the most powerfully insightful opinion piece I have ever read.
I’ll quote portions and add a few of my own comments. Cohen begins addressing the most barbaric enemy the U.S. has ever faced: fundamental Islam.
It was the time of unraveling. Long afterward, in the ruins, people asked: How could it happen?
It was a time of beheadings. With a left-handed sawing motion, against a desert backdrop, in bright sunlight, a Muslim with a British accent cut off the heads of two American journalists and a British aid worker. The jihadi seemed comfortable in his work, unhurried. His victims were broken. Terror is theater…
He next addresses the resurrected Russian Bear.
It was a time of aggression. The leader of the largest nation on earth pronounced his country encircled, even humiliated. He annexed part of a neighboring country, the first such act in Europe since 1945, and stirred up a war on further land he coveted. His surrogates shot down a civilian passenger plane. The victims, many of them Europeans, were left to rot in the sun for days. He denied any part in the violence, like a puppeteer denying that his puppets’ movements have any connection to his…
Cohen next takes to the United Kingdom.
It was a time of breakup. The most successful union in history, forged on an island in the North Sea in 1707, headed toward possible dissolution…
My beloved United States of America follows.
It was a time of weakness. The most powerful nation on earth was tired of far-flung wars, its will and treasury depleted by absence of victory. An ungrateful world could damn well police itself. The nation had bridges to build and education systems to fix… The nation’s leader mockingly derided his own “wan, diffident, professorial” approach to the world, implying he was none of these things, even if he gave that appearance. He set objectives for which he had no plan. He made commitments he did not keep…
He painfully continues.
It was a time of hatred. Anti-Semitic slogans were heard in the land that invented industrialized mass murder for Europe’s Jews…
It was a time of fever. People in West Africa bled from the eyes.
And Roger Cohen concludes.
It was a time of disorientation. Nobody connected the dots or read Kipling on life’s few certainties: “The Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire / And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire.”
Until it was too late and people could see the Great Unraveling for what it was and what it had wrought.
I am so sad to think of the future my children and grandchildren will inherit without men and women of good character standing up for the truth and praying for a divine intervention.