Dr. Jack Wheeler
September 5, 2013
My wife and I spent much of the summer in our favorite museum. It's called Europe. Not a museum in Europe, but Europe itself.
Since America is an island, Americans tend to be insular and consider their problems to be the world's best. But it is not so.
For Americans, the rest of the world is thousands of miles away across the Pacific or Atlantic, while Canada is that cold place far to the north where they say "eh" all the time, while Mexico is that sweltering place all the illegals come from - hence Americans see their country as a giant isolated island. A separate universe.
When things are going good, we think there's no place better - a perspective for which there is justification. When things are going bad, we think no place on earth is going to hell in a handbasket faster. We consider Zero to be such a horrendous disaster because we've never been deranged enough to engage in electoral masochism before.
This is a first for us - but for much of the rest of the world, it's the norm. Masochism, in the form of people accepting subjugation from thugs who declared themselves chiefs, kings, and emperors, has been the political way of life for most of human history. We view America as "the exceptional nation" because it is the exception to this history.
Our cultural progenitor enabling this exception was Europe. Now that Europe is regressing, our fear is that we are too. But fear is a waste of time. Unless we use fear to assess the extent of actual danger, we'll just wallow in it and not rationally act to get rid of what we're scared of.
So a glance at Europe could be helpful to see where it's fallen into the masochistic mire so we can avoid doing so.
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