Rise or Fall?

I think that every nation starts to devolve and fall apart into explosion and ruin after enough time passes. Maybe it's human nature. Maybe the US has been riding the afterglow of its infant idealism and now its starting to turn on itself and crumble, as every great society has done throughout history, only to reform as something else, over and over again. Every more ancient country has endured ebbs of civilizations, free thought and intellect, only to be overrun with tyranny, back and forth, over and over. Many are more humble and less loud-mouthed now than the USA. And that's probably why. Human nature being what it's historically proven itself to be, are we really expecting America to act differently? Please.

Maybe it's the beginning of the end of American Democracy and a new era of something else...something more violent, closed minded, backwards. Perhaps not. Perhaps opposite. I don't know. And it might be a long, drawn out end, but an end seems inevitable.

In the long run, the human story has always been a tumultuous, wrenching and often miserable one. We can't help warring and fighting over the right to institute our religious beliefs, our rules, our desires upon the lives of others and society as a whole. Then people grow weary of being oppressed, rise up, and change things. Rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat.

It seems like, until we can learn to truly live and let live (not simply tolerate temporarily until we feel it's permissible to be tyrannical again), unless we can truly do this, the same old tumult and misery of human history is unavoidable. We have short memories for lessons learned. We're like twenty-year-olds who think they know everything, but what do we truly understand as we age? Only that we really don't know much at all. Humility is wisdom. Unlike any other species, humans have egos, and especially in America today, our egos are our Achilles heels. They drive us to fear, greed, apathy and war, over and over again. America is young. We're due some more growing pains. I just pray we make it past this self-destructive phase and learn to control our egos and reinvent ourselves well.