Quote:
Originally Posted by Takeda Shingen
(Post 1925419)
I agree with that. We have this quaint, as the word was thrown around, notion that our modern nation states are somehow things of permanence. People point to the nations like the 1000 year old Britian and the 3000 year old China as examples. The truth is that each of those nations existed in a multitude of different governances and styles of government and were wroght with various civil wars and wars of succession. They blew themselves apart and reformed themselves into something different; much like nature's cycle of death and new life. Sometimes they didn't reform themselves at all, or were absorbed into another state. The likelyhood that something of that sort will occur again in the United States is so high as to almost be a certainty.
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Yep, and in some sense the US is blessed to be as stable as it has been. There is very little living memory of uncertainty and social collapse in the US, and while most people know it can happen, it's not an immediate reality for most people living there. So that does give many a somewhat naive perspective, and I don't mean that as an insult - just as a suggestion that for most, something like a revolution is so surreal that they can't even picture it as anything other than a bad movie plot. Then compare this to, for example, people from Eastern Europe. There's some massive changes in their recent memory. For me, having lived through the collapse of the communist system is really a bit of an eye-opener. Things can and do change violently, for better or/and worse. The good news is that even massive changes aren't all people cut them out to be. In these cycles of social and political change, people who have little personal experience of them tend to see something apocalyptic. In reality, stuff happens, life goes on. Instead of panicking and stocking guns, I think people need to be more open-minded and proactive about changes they see happening around them, especially if they live in a society where it's their right (and even obligation) to do something about their own civic circumstances. |
