Searching for a Piece of America's Obituary
Channel: Matt
Date: 12/08/2020

If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read “Vietnam.” -- Martin Luther King, Jr. (April 4, 1967) 

All empires eventually overextend themselves in their efforts to prevent potential competitors and threats, and the reason all empires overextend themselves is because at some point in their history, their military commits egregious mistakes and atrocities, which must be assuaged with propaganda in order to maintain forward movement. 

For the United States, the Catholic-backed Vietnam War was the beginning of such moral lapses, and the failure of Americans to prevent Catholic political influence since then has led to continued moral descent, including deliberate coverups of child molestation by priests. The lesson for other countries should be straightforward: if your military commits a moral mistake, you must own up to it and resolve it as best as possible, or you will find yourself on a slippery slope towards overall decline. For once an individual, entity, or government seeks to evade responsibility for death and destruction of one's fellow human being, it is not so great a leap towards fudging numbers at the accountancy firm or approving mortgage loans on questionable terms. The initial moral lapse, if unaddressed, cracks the overall societal fabric, creating a chasm eventually large enough for everyone to fall through. Before then, however, segregation is the preferred method to prevent the cracking of the Establishment, and it is the segregation that is most easily seen in any declining Empire. 

After the video, I passed *another* three churches on the way to my residence, one Seventh Day Adventist, one Korean, and one Jehovah's Witnesses. As I said in the video, you may find yourself blaming Christianity when writing the obituary of the United States, but in reality, you are viewing segregation as well as poor real estate development. I passed only one park and one community center, and as you saw, many streets were not properly lit. The numerous Christian offshoots are the result of dispersed groups not part of the Catholic political infrastructure attempting to support each other, an attempt flowing from the government's failure to provide sufficient common spaces where diverse groups can freely meet and interact. When such segregation becomes natural, it gives the appearance of diversity and progress when in fact the reality is that it represents fragmentation and the Establishment's failure to incorporate groups in ways that actively seek common direction. And so, while all religious centers we saw were Christian and thus possess familiar commonalities, they actually represent segregation and differences as wide as different religions, which is why they exist as separate entities (apart from tax advantages). 

Appearances can be deceiving, and the presence of a cross on a building does not mean its adherents believe the same things or vote the same way, just as the appearance of new cars does not represent wealth but consumer debt. And because the things we see do not represent the things they appear to be, once a country loses its moral compass, only economic transactions and marketing around such transactions bind residents together, elevating the banking system and its efficacy as the vanguard of stability. On this path comes economic growth but also the dangers of inflation and unequal spending, both public and private. Over time, when economic growth slows, a minority is always in the ghetto or segregated area to chastise and to absorb our animal passions so as to deflect attention from the majority's continued failure to right the direction of its moral compass. 

The writer or documentarian, if independent and curious, is the only one capable of bridging such chasms as they grow wider, but such writers can only function within open societies where others are willing to risk criticism. When they ask, "What good is a writer," tell them this: only the writer can defeat the invisible barriers and borders that separate residents in their hometowns from each other, regardless of distance, and only the writer can minimize the space between ourselves in ways allowing us to take the final step into our common humanity. (August 2020)