America’s #1 Enemy

Why do certain phrases take root in the brain and others don’t?

I’ve no idea how many millions of words and phrases I’ve heard or read in my 58 years… but the vast majority I know I’ll never recall. So why is it that “We have met the enemy and he is us” has stuck in my head for nearly 50 years?

I was about 9 or 10 years old when one of my mom’s buddies gifted me an old copy of a book—a collection of Pogo newspaper cartoons by Walt Kelly. I was young but I still understood on some level that these cartoons were political satire, and they resonated because I’ve despised politicians since an early age (they always seemed to pop up on TV talking about stuff I never cared about right in the middle of prime-time TV after I finished my homework).

Maybe that’s why the phrase stuck? I don’t know.

But whatever… the point is that Pogo’s comment about us being our own worst enemy has been with me for nearly half a century, and sadly it feels so apropos to the moment.

See, every day the hammer pulls another nail out of the support structure holding America together.

I do not want this to come across as a political column in which I’m taking sides. I’m truly not. At the core of my being, I’m a deep purple American. Middle of the road.

Yet every day I read the news coming out of America, and I see the hammer pulling out another nail.

Laws enacted in certain states that either take away rights, impose a minority belief system on the majority, or demonstrate stunning levels of ignorance that cause those of us in the middle to silently rage at the death of common sense…

Like Pogo said, the enemy is us.

We are a country pulling itself apart. A late-stage empire in the throes of self-destruction.

Why?

It goes back to what I’ve said in so many dispatches over the years chronicling the Red/Blue divide… Both sides push agendas that are too far left and too far right.

Those voices that speak truth to the middle of America—the vast, VAST majority of the population—are marginalized and demonized as not sufficiently supportive of a far-right or far-left agenda.

As I say too often: This is not going to end well.

I’m not negative by nature. I’m positive and upbeat. But I’m also not blind to reality, and I know history.

All empires—the biggest of history’s bigwigs—become their own undoing. Usually, that’s tied to arrogance and the widely accepted delusion that “this time it’s different.” “We’re not like all those other empires.”

History is cold and uncaring.

Romans, Ottomans, Huns, Spanish, British… they were each their own worst enemy. They were destroyed from within. Their own failings brought them down.

And their time at the top of the global power structure came to an end.

America’s unraveling is the greatest reality show ever. We’re watching it happen in real time and the people in charge—politicians, high-level bureaucrats—they’re doing nothing.

In fact, they’re instigating it.

Politicians calling for a national divorce… lawmakers passing legislation that so clearly violates the Constitution… Supreme Court justices on the take and making rules based on their own beliefs or those of the people and companies paying them… bureaucrats and organizations that push agendas that do not reflect American values as a whole…

All of that and so much more foreshadows the end of America as we know it…

Which will bring about the end of the dollar as a reserve currency.

Which will alter America’s economy in painful ways.

Which is why I continually urge you to prepare.

As Walt Kelly also once said, “We are confronted with insurmountable opportunities.”

In the America we have today, the people in charge of promoting those opportunities are instead leading the country down an inglorious path…

Sadly, more to come on this soon…