The American Empire is now at the height of its power. But just as the Romans were foolish to claim that their empire would last forever, so are the neocons and their apologists. We are not immortal. We will last only as long as we have the resources to sustain ourselves. But now, the Republican Party is embarking on an unsustainable course which led to the collapse of the Roman Empire and which will lead to the collapse of the American Empire as well.
The problem with this country is spiritual -- like the song says, we are like a monster on the loose. And this Steppenwolf song is now even more relevant today than it was in the 1960's, with John McCain promising to deliver us 100 more years of warfare in Iraq, along with war with Iran as well. Instead of the maverick that he so liked to tout himself as, he has morphed into a tool of the military industrial complex. There is a reason why Dwight Eisenhower's children have become Democrats -- they know as well as anyone that their father would not recognize the Republican Party as it is today.
There is a fundamental choice between the Democrats and Republicans -- the Democrats would put us on a rational path that is much more sustainable. Both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton offer extremely detailed plans for how they would create a more sustainable future for this country. But John McCain, on the other hand, does not offer anything on his website about how he would address the problem of gas prices, peak oil, or energy policy. For all his lip service about the environment, McCain offers nothing about how he would convert us to a wind/solar based economy.
Instead, John McCain would embark us on the same failed path that the Romans embarked on 2000+ years ago. The Romans were able to sustain themselves by extracting the wealth of conquered countries, and for many centuries, they were able to enjoy a long period of sustained growth off the backs of the people that they conquered. But by the time of Augustus, they had reached their natural limits -- they were hindered by the Picts, Irish, and Germans on the north, the Persians on the east, and desert on the south. There were no more resources for them to extract. From there, it was a long slow decline, as their people began fighting over an ever-dwindling supply of resources.
And at some point, the Bush/McCain policy of extracting foreign resources for our own benefit will be unsustainable. The Bush administration and John McCain never counted on the Iraqi people to take up arms to fight our solders; they thought it would all be flowers and kisses. At some point, we will reach the point of no return on our oil, and there will be a long, slow decline of our American empire. The beast that fed itself will starve as the world's resources will become scarcer and scarcer.
In Rome, the end result of the unsustainable policies of that country was that the poor became poorer, the rich packed up and went to Constantinople, where all the action was, and there was no more wealth to buy off the barbarians which were invading the West. People no longer felt a sense of loyalty to their country; instead, their sole concern was the survival of their families. Solders entrusted to guard the borders routinely deserted their posts in the final few centuries to tend to their gardens and families as their pay was not enough for a living.
This growing gap between the rich and the poor is also happening here. People are becoming less and less concerned and engaged in American politics, concentrating only on their jobs and their families. Around here, about 90% of civil lawsuits filed are by debt collectors like healthcare providers and credit card companies trying to collect debt that they are owed.
Strong leaders can head off collapse for a time. Diocletian in the latter part of the 3rd century fended off a round of barbarian invasions that were threatening to overrun the Empire. Constantine moved the capitol to Constantinople and split the Empire into two so that it would be easier to administer. Perhaps he foresaw what was going to happen and decided that the best thing for the survival of the Empire was to start all over again.
In the same way, we were on the verge of collapse during the Great Depression as the failed policies of the Republican Party caused the Stock Market to collapse, people to lose their life savings in banks that were failing, and communities and families to disintegrate. Franklin Roosevelt was able to head off the collapse of our country and usher in a new round of prosperity thanks to the New Deal and his strong moral leadership during World War II. In the same way, there is a widespread perception that we are on the verge of collapse thanks to the multiple factors of unsustainable debt thanks to Iraq, the mortage crisis, global warming, gas prices going through the roof, and the rise of poverty in this country that John Edwards warned about.
In the same way, a strong leader can still pull us back from the brink for a generation or even a few. After the depraved reign of Nero, a series of emperors had, for the most part, brought about relative stability to the empire for over 100 years. But since the empire was rotten to the core, all it took was one bad emperor (Commodus) to push them over the brink and into a protracted period of anarchy.
But if we are to head off the fall of America, then Neale Donald Walsch argues that we must do more:
But you will create critical mass around the idea of changing things if, and only if, you "get" that not to change things is creating critical mass in another direction—a direction that you may not wish to take.
In other words, we had better change things, or things are going to change for us, in ways that we do not prefer.
In fact, as you yourself just said, they are.
And when these changes that we do not prefer start to really mount up, we will change. We will change our ideas about Life, if only as a means of survival.
Not "if only." Primarily.
Primarily as a means of survival, you will change.
If your survival is directly threatened, you will do what you have to do. You will even change your most sacred and long-held beliefs about yourselves, about God, about Life, about everything, if you have to.
You will always choose survival, make no mistake about that. You are encoded to do so. This instinct is, as I said earlier, "built in." Life is functional, adaptable, and sustainable. Always.
And if you have to choose just exactly what it is that is going to survive—your species or the beliefs of your species—you will choose your species and abandon your beliefs.
You would abandon those beliefs that are killing you, that are impairing your ability to survive, right now, but the negative effect of most of your most damaging beliefs is so insidious, is so slow in showing itself, that you do not recognize them as being damaging.
So, what are these beliefs that are killing us? I would submit that the belief that my tribe is better than your tribe is. I would submit that belief systems that stand in the way of the ideal of us being one world family are what is killing us right now. Take fundamentalism -- that twisted belief system that claims that my god is better than your god has been responsible for the deaths of millions of people throughout world history, as is any other form of religious fundamentalism for that matter.
The Emperor Julian was one of the voices who recognized the dangers that fundamentalism would bring and the havoc that it would wreak. He was, in many respects, a heroic figure for the stand that he took against the forces of fundamentalism that were taking shape across the Roman Empire. But even he missed the mark -- he, like many other emperors, wasted countless resources in futile efforts at conquest and glory. His own life was lost in a futile effort to conquer Persia, which was a complete and total disaster.
The moral of this story is that while we must stand against the forces of tribalism and narrow-mindedness that have plagued humanity throughout human history, we cannot go back to the past. We cannot, for instance, go back to a time when we were relatively isolated from the world and expect to survive. We cannot, however, continue the way that we are. Instead, we have to plan for a future that will be totally different from the past.
If aliens were to attack us, all of the differences between Christian and Muslim and Hindu and Jew and White and Black would be put aside as we would fight against the common enemy. The scary truth is that we can no longer rely on Imperial Americana to impose her will on the rest of the world -- we have to follow a new ethic. Instead of nations and tribes, we have to act as one world family, where one person's life halfway around the globe is worth as much as our own. If you read the annals of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, you will find that greed, ego, ambition, and selfishness were in full display, fueled by the policies of the Empire itself.
And as long as we cling to the notion of Pax Americana, that is an inherently selfish notion that will attract the most selfish people who think that they have the divine right to be in power. Only when we rule from a position of moral and spiritual authority that people around the world give us of their own free will will we be able to maintain our greatness.