VDH Joins the Wake

Late last week I wrote that CA is “no longer the optimistic, can-do, inventing-the-future kind of place it was when we were growing up.” Now along comes California-based historian Victor Davis Hanson who generalizes my plaint to our entire country, and makes a good case for it, writing for PJ Media.

Our ancestors were builders and pioneers and mostly fearless. We are regulators, auditors, bureaucrats, adjudicators, censors, critics, plaintiffs, defendants, social media junkies and thin-skinned scolds. A distant generation created; we mostly delay, idle and gripe.

As we walk amid the refuse, needles and excrement of the sidewalks of our fetid cities; as we sit motionless on our jammed ancient freeways; and as we pout on Twitter and electronically whine in the porticos of our Ivy League campuses, will we ask: "Who were these people who left these strange monuments that we use but can neither emulate nor understand?"

In comparison to us, they now seem like gods.

Kurt Vonnegut predicted our current malaise in his then-satirical 1961 short story Harrison Bergeron. Vonnegut intended it to be a send-up, not a how-to manual.

Later ... I wonder if Romans who saw their empire stumbling and crumbling felt as I do now? I imagine they must have.