Bob wills said it best, “Dreams don't make noise when they die.”* Mine left me a long time ago; they just ended without a sound and left me rudderless. I muddled through and found life in the real world, but  without something to hold onto. Lately, I tried something new for me; I tried to have a dream. For the first time in forty years, I let go of my rational self and dreamed, of what I won’t say, but it was a good one. Dreams are elusive beasts. They tantalize you with a hope for something better than what you have, and then leave you battered, in disarray, and more hopeless than you were before you started dreaming in the first place, as usual. Three words shattered my dream, and I have returned to my rational world, again without a center, again without hope. Dreams show you hope, beauty, desire—all the things you want, but they don’t show the heartache, the misery, the despair that goes with them. The rational life is preferable to dreams, for me at least, because even though reality generally sucks, it won’t disappoint. With reality, you get the what of a person, for instance, and that can lead you to the who of that person, but don’t count on it. A couple of bone-headed tv shows have very similar lines that go something like this: people too often look only at what a person does or appears to be, physically; they do not look at who a person is, in the real sense. This is the real tragedy of our time on the personal level: who we are is not as important as what we do for a living or what we look like, or how much money we have in the bank. Appearance is all, and appearance is tied to one’s political being.

Having said all that, I now want to consider the loss of a bigger dream, or set of dreams—the loss of western civilization. Today, only one example needs to be set to explain what I mean: the ruling of a judge in Britain allowing the use of sharia law in financial and other aspects of society in Britain.** This is a complete surrender of the western idea base to an alien idea base. What’s worse is that the British public did and said nothing to protest this loss of British sovereignty, nor did the government. In one ruling, a judge, not a legislature, tossed out everything that Britons have fought and died for since 1215 and The Magna Carta. On top of that, the ideals laid out in Greece and Rome were left in the proverbial dust by this ruling. Of course, there are those who say that it is a technical ruling and really won’t affect much of anything and that any who criticize it are just not educated enough to understand the ruling or how sophisticated government works. Baloney! This ruling is not technical nor sophisticated at all. It is a blatant attempt to overthrow, not just a government, but an entire system of self-governance developed over a couple of thousand years or so. Why would anyone countenance this? Perhaps, stupidity, incompetence, or bribery are involved. None of those would surprise me, but there may be a more trenchant answer—fear.

I have written about this before.*** However, this time, it’s not about something as meager as a one night stand; it’s about an entire way of life being eliminated bit by bit by judicial stupidity and legislative incompetence. AND the deafening silence of the people. That’s what is really disturbing: not just the idiocy of government employees of whatever stripe and rank; we can override that, but the crowning apathy and fear of an entire population cannot be overridden. 

The other day, I speculated that the world wars and the cold war were probably the main causes of our moral decay, but they could not be the only causes of societal decay that followed the moral decay. There must be something more, and there is. Perhaps the various ‘isms’ of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are primarily at fault for both moral and societal decays. Both are tied together; one happens, and usually, the other follows along. 

The two worst ‘isms’ of the two centuries are socialism and communism. Of the two, socialism is worse. Churchill said:

Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.****

Socialism also denigrates the soul and saps the spirit of the individual and destroys the heart of civilization by making everything dependent on the state and engaging everyone in a game of victimology and hatred and fear, which vitiates the people and the state even more. Thus both are more vulnerable to interior and exterior threats and less willing to fight those threats.  Ignorance is possibly the most pernicious of the threats brought about by socialism. Ignorant people tend to glory in their ignorance and ‘know’ better than the actual truth about what is going on in their world. The truth is that they are propagandized into believing that the truth is a lie and the lie is the truth.  1984 and the ideas it considersare alive and kicking and used by the proponents of ‘change’ who want nothing changed except for the unlimited right to oppress the people and to make more money doing it. 

As I see it now, the political, social, and personal fates of the western world look grim. Freedom is always taking a hit from somebody. Truth is in short supply. Honesty, fairness, and of course, hope are left to the dustbin of history. No one now speaking for the political groups in any nation speaks of these things, because these things are antithetical to the goals of the political classes everywhere. Franklin D. Roosevelt talked of Four Freedoms in 1942: Freedom of Religion, Freedom from Want, Freedom of Speech and Expression, and Freedom from Fear.***** Today, all these freedoms are under assault, deliberate assault, from the very bodies charged with protecting them and the people from whom they derive. Religion is everywhere under attack, merely for the reason that people believe and wish to act on their belief. Everywhere, people live wanting sustenance merely to live and are denied such by the political classes in order that the politicians can have platforms to run on, or imaginary enemies for the people to fear. Speaking freely and expressing one’s views are everywhere denied by the censorious actions of political correctness and direct censorship by those who hate opposition to their causes. Finally, fear is engendered at every turn, not fear of real enemies, but fear of manufactured enemies in the social and corporate worlds who are said to want to enslave the people. The most basic freedoms are being slowly eroded, and no one is saying a thing in opposition.

Time was that the so-called great speakers would not tolerate the slightest restriction on debate or discussion of the problems of the times. Now, all we hear is the constant whine of the political machines, posing as the voices of the people, denying people the right to question or debate the issues and concerns of the real people—their hopes, their dreams, their very real fears that their world is going away. Maybe we are captives to our own successes and do not realize the danger we face; maybe not. But that racket we hear is growing into an exorable roar that portends the end of everything. We must re-wake the slumbering giant that Admiral Yamamoto feared and again fill him with a terrible resolve, or face consequences that spell out our doom.

*Wills, Bob. “Goin’ Away Party.” Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys for the Last Time. Liberty Records

                (Capitol), 1974.

**Doughty, Stephen. “Sharia Law SHOULD be used in Britain, says U.K.’s Top Judge.”

                www.dailymailonline.com 4 July 2008. 4 July 2008 www.drudgereport.com.

*** ”What Happened to Us?”August 3, 2008.

****Reported on Brainyquote.com

*****Roosevelt, Franklin D. “The Four Freedoms.”  State of the Union Address. 6 January 1941.

                27 June 2002 www.libertynet.org/edcivic/fdr.html.