The gathering momentum of our predicament

A couple of weeks ago, I happened to be vacationing in a locale where an old friend, someone I'd met about ten years ago in a musical context (we're both jazz guitarists; it was an improvisation workshop), but whose mind I admired in a general sense and with whom I'd stayed in touch, resides. My wife and I went to his home for dinner one evening while we were there. As expected, it was a delightful evening, replete with wide-ranging conversations, a great meal, and a fine jam session.

The subject unsurprisingly turned to the obvious acceleration of Western decline. We touched on the particulars, and my friend mentioned the theory put forth in The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy - What the Cycles of History Tell Us About Americas Next Rendezvous With Destiny, a book that posits that history's cycles are comprised of four cycles each, the last two being an unraveling and a crisis. The book is now coming up on being twenty years old, so it's met with the skepticism in some corners that those proffering Big Predictions often come in for.

But here we are. In a moment when post-America is fully - indeed, deliberately - participating in the overall grinding to a halt of the world's economy, and when it is daily beset by fresh threats from hostile actors , and when cultural rot has reached an advanced stage, can anyone deny that we are living a crisis?

That evening, my friend said, "I don't know if it will take the form of economic collapse or a major attack by an enemy or something we aren't yet foreseeing, but we are going to experience something that brings a resolution to this process."

The other day, after returning home, I ran into an American Thinker piece by Robert Array that resonated with our conversation so deeply that I sent it to my friend.

A taste:

  The litany of social upheavals eroding family, morals, and education in America and Europe is well known to those who follow such things.  Likewise, the accelerating advance of technology has affected us all in its breathtaking speed.  Beyond that, radical Islamist terrorism has become destructive not merely in terms of its death toll, but also in the fact that it has become the hate that dare not mention its name.
And therein is encapsulated the nature of the catastrophe about to engulf us.  We are faced not with an enemy we cannot defeat, but with one we dare not offend.  Almost literally, we have met the enemy, and he is us.
The modern American fascists do not wave swastika banners; they go to court to force ordinary citizens to (for example) participate in same-sex wedding ceremonies by providing services to them, whether bakery or photography.  Merely to quote the Bible can bring about civil, even in some cases criminal penalties.  Students on college campuses are not free to state their political preference if that preference is Donald Trump.  Why?  Because some of their fellow students feel "threatened."
The backlash has up until recently been silent.  That is changing.  The Sanders and Trump candidacies are merely the rumblings of a volcano preparing to erupt.  People are fed up.
No one can predict exactly what the spark will be that sets off the powder keg.  All we can say with certainty is that there is a powder keg, and there is a lit fuse.
Boom.

What you're reading now is not the first post of this nature ever to  appear on this blog. After all, the blog is called Late in the Day. And commenters have sometimes taken me to task for what they see as undue alarmism. After all, haven't all of us - the last few Greatest Generation folks, Boomers, X-ers and millennial - lived though the most comfortable and secure times in history? And haven't we seen this nation rally to the moment and, even in precarious times, stave off irreversible disaster?

The answer, of course, is affirmative.

But we've never been so distracted before, so dumbed down.

And not just with American Idol and March Madness.

Most of our distraction is of an unprecedentedly grotesque and bizarre nature.

We are rushing headlong into an obliteration of what it means to be human, as God designed us.

Heather Wilhelm says this is why the current spate of bathroom wars matter:

  . . . in a world where ISIS is expanding into Europe, ghost ships full of corpses are washing onto Japanese shores from North Korea, Hillary Clinton is proposing a $1 trillion tax increase, and people are still paying good money to see Bruce Springsteen, it seems ludicrous to obsess about bathrooms. 

So why can’t we just live and let live? Bathroom law opponents “are crusading against a tiny minority that poses no real threat,” Jillian T. Weiss, a transgender rights lawyer and activist, wrote in Wednesday’s USA Today. In a way, she’s correct: Demonizing transgender people is unfair in any light. But Weiss also misses the bigger picture behind the bathroom brouhaha. It’s not a fight against people. It’s a fight about reality, and whether the government can dictate a certain version of it. Ultimately, it’s a fight about freedom of thought. 

America’s burgeoning bathroom wars, so silly and banal on the surface, are actually quite deep: They fling together two conflicting, wildly incompatible streams of thought. On the transgender side, identity is everything. If gender is truly fluid, and yet truly knowable, then the denial of one’s gender identity is a hurtful denial of one’s very being or self. 

No populace is more ripe for conquest or annihilation than a society comprised of solipsistic eunuchs.

And that is what we are becoming, very fast. We are tampering with the very architecture of the universe, and thereby inviting our collective disembowelment. Our Creator equipped us with the physical, mental and spiritual wherewithal to detect such mortal danger and respond to it effectively, and when we were at least somewhat normal human beings, we did so.

But, like the rest of our birthright, we have rejected it, and now comes the reckoning.