America must rediscover respect for its past or it will have no future. Victor Davis Hanson writes:
Cultural suicide used to be a popular diagnosis of why things suddenly just quit.
Historians such as Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee cited social cannibalism to explain why once-successful states, institutions, and cultures simply died off.
Their common explanation was that the arrogance of success ensures lethal consequences. Once elites became pampered and arrogant, they feel exempt from their ancestors’ respect for moral and spiritual laws like thrift, moderation, and transcendence.
Take professional sports. Over the last century, professional football, basketball, and baseball were racially integrated and adopted a uniform code of patriotic observance. The three leagues offered fans a pleasant respite from daily barroom politics. As a result, by the 21st century, the NFL, NBA, and MLB had become global multibillion-dollar enterprises.
Then hubris ensued.
[Victor Davis Hanson, “Our Summer of Cultural Suicide,” The Daily Signal, July 31]
At the rate major League Baseball is going, those cardboard “fans” in the photo will be about all they will have.
Hard to sell over-priced bad beer and hot dogs to paper people without stomachs!
Let’s put things in perspective, the Vietnam war lasted nearly 20 years and less than 59,000 Americans lost their lives. The communist Chinese’ Wuhan virus has killed over 153,000 Americans. American businesses are going under and joblessness has exploded because the communist Chinese govt turned the deadly man-made COVID-19 loose on America. The virus actions by communist China feels like an act of war. China is liable for the many trillions of dollars we Americans have lost; including lost sports revenue. On July 30, it was reported “the United States GDP fell 32.9% in the second quarter of 2020, the Department of Commerce reported, marking the largest decline the country has ever seen.” The record GDP decline is due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The Chinese government has and is doing great harm to this country.