Is America a Zombie Nation?
Are we basically a hollowed-out husk of a culture, shambling around mindlessly feeding ourselves on what our base, selfish instincts tells us to grab onto without much, if anything, in the way of restraint?
It would seem so.
“We the people” actually believe – and will proudly tell you if you give us the chance (and often times even if you don’t) that we have the right to do pretty much whatever we want.
We’re Americans!
We can openly worship any god that we want!
We can openly blaspheme the one true God any time we want!
We can openly operate porn businesses if we want!
We can even openly murder and dismember our own little baby buys and girls for convenience and profit if we want!
We even call these things our “God-given rights”, if you can believe it.
Welcome to ‘Merica: The “land of the free” and the home of the self-described “brave”.
So yeah, our self-centered, self-serving, self-referential madness has taken the culture into a remarkably zombie-like mode, where all we seem to know is that we hunger for certain things and that it’s only natural and right for us to do whatever it takes to get those things. That’s just how “the real world” works, or so we have been conditioned to believe.
The past few days have given us a few more redundant glimpses into who we are and where we are going as a culture.
The first reference-point-of-the-moment that I’d like to touch on is yesterday’s ZombiCon shooting in Fort Meyers, Florida, in which one was killed and four were wounded by a shooter at a zombie-themed event that drew a crowd of over 20,000. Let me be plain that I am not (probably to the disappointment of many) critiquing here the notion of a zombie-themed event, though I am certain that ZombiCon is indeed a…[*ahem*]…target rich environment. The main takeaway aimed for here is that our culture is such that it presently can draw tens of thousands to a single ZombiCon event while only a fraction of that number would be involved in actively opposing any of the baby mass murdering “businesses” openly operating nearby. Just think what a crowd of 10,000 baby-loving, murder-hating people could accomplish by surrounding one such “clinic”. Food for thought…
Next up is a very intriguing article entitled “America is a bomb waiting to explode”, in which RT’s Sam Gerrans writes:
The United States is in decline. While not all major shocks to the system will be devastating, when the right one comes along, the outcome may be dramatic.
Not all explosives are the same. We all know you have to be careful with dynamite. Best to handle it gently and not smoke while you’re around it.
Semtex is different. You can drop it. You can throw it. You can put it in the fire. Nothing will happen. Nothing until you put the right detonator in it, that is.
To me, the US – and most of the supposedly free West – increasingly looks like a truck being systematically filled with Semtex.
But it’s easy to counter cries of alarm with the fact that the truck is stable – because it’s true: you can hurl more boxes into the back without any real danger. Absent the right detonator, it is no more dangerous than a truckload of mayonnaise.
But add the right detonator and you’re just one click away from complete devastation.
Gerrans then goes on to elaborate upon four reasons for viewing America as a bomb waiting to go off:
We can see how fragile the U.S. is now by considering just four tendencies.
1. Destruction of farms and reliable food source
The average American is a long way from food when the shops are closed.
The Washington Post reports that the number of farms in the country has fallen by some 4 million from more than 6 million in 1935 to roughly 2 million in 2012.
And according to the College of Agriculture & Life Sciences, only about 2 percent of the US population live on farms.
That means that around 4.6 million people currently have the means to feed themselves.
Food supply logistics are extended, sometimes stretching thousands of miles. The shops have nothing more than a few days’ stock. A simple break in that supply line would clear the shops out in days.
State- and corporate dependence are staples of Statism. Since Statism is the religion of America and the State is the god of most Americans in practice – including most professing conservative Christian Americans – it should then come as no surprise that we are generally in such a weak and dependent state as Americans. (See also: Our “Free Money” Heroin Habit: Why “conservative Christian” Americans sell their own children for just one more hit of Socialism.)
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2. Weak economic system
The American economic system is little more than froth.
The US currency came off the gold standard in 1933 and severed any link with gold in 1971. Since then, the currency has been essentially linked to oil, the value of which has been protected and held together by wars.
The whole world has had enough of the US and its hubris – not least the people of the US themselves, which the massive support currently for Putin’s decision to deal with ISIS demonstrates.
Since pro-active war is what keeps the US going, if it loses the monopoly on that front, its decline is inevitable.
Fiat economies always collapse. They last on average for 37 years. By that metric the US should have already run out of gas.
Once people wake up and smell the Yuan, the Exodus out of the dollar will be unstoppable.
This is something we’ve been writing/warning about here for a while now…usually to responses of sighs and silence from a “conservative Christian” American populace that has been conditioned to just ignore reality, look the other way, and hope/imagine that it’ll all somehow work out in the end. (See also: Why stop spending when you can just print more “money”?)
3. Americans increasingly on mind-altering drugs
According to the Scientific American, use of antidepressants among the US population was up 400 percent in the late 2000s over the 1990s. Many of these drugs are selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors.
These are the type of FDA-approved narcotics lone gunmen are frequently associated with, and their psychoses often attributed to a forced or sudden withdrawal from such drugs.
Pharmaceuticals are produced at centralized points by companies which themselves rely on extended logistics systems both to produce and to deliver their output. If the logistics system fails, there’s no more supply.
This is another America-defining subject that we’ve touched on here from time to time…and it’s another subject that most “conservative Christian” Americans want to ignore or rationalize far more than they want to deal with it biblically. (See: Sin? We have a pill for that.)
4. Morals in decline
During the objective hardship of the 1930s, there was surprisingly little crime. People were brought up with a conception of morals and right and wrong. Frugality and prudence were prized virtues. Communities were generally fairly cohesive.
Relative to then, society today is undisciplined, unrealistic and selfish.
Around 250 million shoppers participated in the Black Friday sales in 2013 in which around USD 61 billion was spent on consumer items – up roughly 100 percent on 2006 figures.
Stampedes and even murders are not uncommon each year with people openly fighting each other over reduced-price items.
The goods bought in such sales tend to be non-essential and many of them are bought on credit cards which then have to be paid off at interest.
Part of the problem in what I have outlined above is that there is little explicit tension. Sure, it is depressing, vulgar and immoral. But it doesn’t look catastrophic. It looks normal.
My point is that just because US – and many other countries organised after the same template – do not look explosive, doesn’t mean they won’t blow up.
Whereas 80 years ago we could absorb major shocks, today we cannot.
Here’s an area where most professing conservative Christians in America have no trouble agreeing…but little appetite admitting that it is we who are more to blame for the collapse of morality and implosion of ethics in the culture. (See: Judgment begins with the Church…not the Democrats.)
Gerrans concludes his article with force and yet another (perhaps unintended, at least by Gerrans) call to repentance:
Nowhere to run
In the past, people were in rural communities. They could grow food. They had real communities. They also had self-control and a conception of morality.
Today, if the supply lines go down, you are stuck in a house you can’t heat surrounded by millions of FDA-approved drug addicts who are going psycho because they have run out of juice and people who would murder their own grandmother to get a cut-price iPhone.
I would argue that the right shock event – or combination of shock events – will detonate the explosive.
So are we a bomb waiting to explode?
Are we a zombie culture shambling around waiting to finally, fully die?
Are we both?
Yeah…probably both in many meaningful ways. On the cultural bomb front, the four points made by Gerrans seem straightforward enough. The most troubling thing about those four points is that there’s nothing really new there; we’ve known those things for a long time now and don’t seem to have any desire to repent and reform in any one of ’em, at least not en masse (God is graciously moving a remnant along those lines of repentance, though).
Which seems to at least imply that the zombie attribute is spot on as well. We really are more like the walking dead than any proud American would ever want to admit…which means that we need a supernatural solution.
More Statism won’t help us.
More “We the People” as God in practice won’t help us.
Those things will only bring us further down the trail into darkness.
All that we have – our one and only true hope for restoration and resurrection both as individuals and as a culture – is repentance and submission to Christ as King in practice.
That’s it, folks.
That’s the only route outta this smoldering heap of wreckage known as America.
May God grace His people with the desire and power to actively repent, reform, and submit to Him in that way…while there is yet time.
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Intro to Fire: The Power and Purpose of the Common Believer
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You are absolutely right about this Scott. I also have been talking about these things as well. My eyes were opened to the legalized drug problem about 8 years ago . I was trying to quit smoking and got a prescription for Chantix. I read all the warnings about it and decided to try it anyway . About 7 days into it I began to notice that my ability to discern right from wrong was quickly failing ; I felt like I could commit a serious crime and not have any remorse , it scared me and I stopped using the drug. I have since warned several people about the dangers of this drug along with all the other stuff they are pumping into our kids to make them more subdued in class. I am convinced that this along with our anti-God society, and lack of moral teaching, has caused the bulk of these mass shootings. But when you tell people this stuff, and warn them that the dollar is soon to crash, that millions of EBT and Welfare addicts will be rioting in the city streets, they just look at you like "zombies" and continue on with their conversation. It's like some of those scenes from the Matrix, where someone comes into the scene and then in a wink is gone again. I've expressed these views at our men's group and rec'd that same reaction, it's like I wasn't really there, like they saw a flash of light and realized , oh, it was nothing , and they go right back to talking about how awful it is that they want to remove the Nativity scene from the town hall .
Donhorn,
Did you read the same post?
America, don't ever let this administration, any congressman, any US diplomat or any liberal media tell you that Saddam Hussein didn't have weapons of mass destruction. How do you think he killed thousands of Kurds and many of his own people. The problem is that American officials made a feeble attempt to find them, some buried in some inconspicuous place and most likely some shipped to Syria and perhaps another terrorists country. But for sure, he shipped some, maybe all he had to Syria and that Bashar Hafez al-Assad used on his own people! So, the terrorist Hussein indeed did have those WMD's, I don't care what anybody says! It only makes sense that he did have them because of what he did with them!