u****n
发帖数: 7521 | 1 http://www.thetrumpet.com/index.php?q=7835.6441.0.0
It’s Hard to Watch Your Country Die －One can’t help but sigh and cry.
看到你的祖国死去很痛苦，只有止不住的叹息和哭泣。
America suffers with several ills from which it will not recover. This
reality is becoming inescapably plain.
美国正在遭受病痛的折磨，这个病好不了了。这是一个不可避免的（inescapable）而
且很简单的（ plain）事实。
原文链接＋全文
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It’s Hard to Watch Your Country Die
January 12, 2011 | From theTrumpet.com
One can’t help but sigh and cry.
Robert Gates says don’t underestimate America.
The talk in global political circles is that the U.S. is washed up. America
’s defense secretary, traveling to China this week, addressed the gossip.
“I’ve watched this sort of cyclical view of American decline come around
two or three times, perhaps most dramatically in the latter half of the
1970s,” he said. “And my general line for those both at home and around
the world who think the U.S. is in decline is that history’s dustbins are
filled with countries that underestimated the resilience of the United
States.”
Maybe so. But it seems like it’s hard to underestimate America these days.
When was the last time anyone faced any consequences for doing so?
The secretary’s words ring especially hollow when you look at where he was
heading. China has plenty cause for a low estimation of the United States.
America owes it probably a trillion dollars. And China looks poised to
single-handedly neutralize America’s robust, decades-long influence in the
Asia Pacific thanks to a military spending binge that will yield aircraft-
carrier-killing missiles, not to mention aircraft carriers and stealth
planes.
Meanwhile, Secretary Gates, just days earlier, announced that America will
slash military spending by $78 billion. The contrast between a country
rising and a country sliding is stark.
It’s painful to watch someone you love dying of a terminal sickness. The
same must be said of seeing a country you love die.
America suffers with several ills from which it will not recover. This
reality is becoming inescapably plain. There is hope—a bright, shining,
sure hope for this country. But it is most certainly not to be found in any
of the sources that naive optimists look to. We must face facts.
The virtues America once embodied have largely faded. The blessings America
once enjoyed have been squandered.
America’s military dominance is proving inadequate. America’s wars are
proving impossible. Our allies are leaving us. Our enemies are provoking us.
“America is funding its military supremacy through deficit spending,
meaning the war in Afghanistan is effectively being paid for with a Chinese
credit card,” Foreign Policy wrote. The epic indebtedness to China and the
shrinking military are both symptoms of an irreparably broken economy. Not
only has America’s fiscal irresponsibility gone on too long to correct, the
country shows no sign of having the will to even try.
Despite growing unemployment, despite ruinous private and public debt,
despite whole states risking bankruptcy, despite the federal government now
paying its bills with nothing but printed paper, Americans keep spending
like good times will roll forever. In the past decade, people’s incomes
declined for the first time in America’s history—yet spending kept rising.
Frugality, thrift, moderation, self-control, self-sufficiency—it seems
such perennially American virtues are permanently lost, buried by rank
materialism and excess.
The nation simply will not recover from this condition before it pays dearly
for it. At the end of 2010, the national debt cracked $14 trillion—and
debt growth is only accelerating. The last Congress racked up a stupefying $
3.22 trillion in debt in two quick years. After an election that supposedly
rebuked Washington for its profligacy, Republicans agreed to a spending bill
that will add another trillion to the debt.
This new Congress will not reverse this juggernaut trend. Newcomers
agitating for change face a House controlled by one party, a Senate
controlled by the other, and a president with veto power and a bulldog
determination to keep expanding the government.
And, truth be told, he’s got the people behind him. Maybe not for
healthcare. But Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare represent more than $
100 trillion in unfunded liabilities—and no politician plans to lose his
job trying to prevent those programs from bankrupting the country. The
problem isn’t Obama: The wild spending, the disastrous deficits, the
entitlements, the bailouts—these all started with his “conservative”
Republican predecessor. The problem is Washington—and the voters who decide
who to send there.
The children of hard-bitten, self-reliant settlers who conquered the West
have become grabby government dependents. In today’s America, only 58.2
percent of the civilian population is even employed.
The nation’s spreading economic and political sickness is matched by its
moral decline. Despite warnings from military leaders and front-line
soldiers of how it will hurt America’s fighting capability, civilian
leaders decided that homosexuals can now freely serve in the military. At a
press conference celebrating this policy “victory,” the president said his
views on same-sex “marriage” are “evolving.” Those views, like those of
the general population, will never “evolve” back to upholding the plain
definition of marriage that has underpinned stable families—and strong
societies—for millennia.
As if the stabilizing force of family isn’t being rocked enough. “The
social pathologies long associated with the inner-city poor—single-parent
households, births out of wedlock, drug and alcohol abuse—now stalk the
white working class in rural and post-industrial regions far removed from
big cities,” reports the Washington Post. In the nation’s capital, more
than half of family households are run by single parents. In one area of
Washington, only a quarter of homes contain a functioning marriage; of the
remaining homes, nearly 9 in 10 are run by women.
No wonder 40 percent of Americans think marriage is becoming obsolete: A
generation is growing up without even seeing what it is supposed to look
like. Fractured families breed more fractured families. This is a sickness
that simply will not heal.
The litany of such problems goes on and on. Each headline shows a bleaker
prognosis, a new pain, another symptom bound only to get worse.
“The passing of the Christian West signifies the end not only of a
worldview, but of a character type—one based on honor, family, self-help,
blood-and-soil patriotism, personal responsibility and a God-centered moral
order,” wrote Jeffrey Kuhner. “Self-indulgence and self-expression have
filled the vacuum. Life is no longer about sacrifice and duty; it’s about
maximizing pleasure and self-fulfillment.”
Viewing this phenomenon, one can’t help but sigh and cry—as the Prophet
Isaiah did, speaking prophetically of America today: “Ah sinful nation, a
people laden with iniquity, a seed of evildoers, children that are
corrupters: they have forsaken the Lord, they have provoked the Holy One of
Israel unto anger, they are gone away backward. … [T]he whole head is sick,
and the whole heart faint. From the sole of the foot even unto the head
there is no soundness in it; but wounds, and bruises, and putrifying sores:
they have not been closed, neither bound up, neither mollified with ointment
” (Isaiah 1:4-6). It’s painful to watch, particularly in a country you
love.
Secretary Gates’s statement to the Chinese may have been technically
accurate. But the far more relevant truth is that history’s dustbins are
filled with countries that overestimated their own resilience. •
The true hope that lies ahead for the United States is prophesied in the
Bible. You can read about it in Herbert W. Armstrong’s book The United
States and Britain in Prophecy, particularly the last chapter, “What’s
Prophesied to Happen, Now—to America and Britain.”
Joel Hilliker’s column appears every Wednesday.
To e-mail Joel Hilliker, click here.
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