A progressive frustration is building among those on the goodship United States that are seeing all the signs of a foundered boat and are seemingly unable to divert those who are naively or perhaps deliberately  navigating it toward the rocks.  What to do when you see the ship obliviously heading toward the iceberg and your warning shouts are drowned out in the stiff wind?  How to respond when the reef has been struck, water is pouring in and those in charge state everything is under control and continue to pretend there is no danger of calamity?  Is the ship so far out to sea that deciding to preserve yourself when she sinks ends up with you on a lifeboat with no hope for rescue or shore?  How does one respond when the captain responsible for navigating the ship through dangerous waters plows ahead blindly and when finally appreciating crisis blames all others for the debacle?

     We are rapidly reaching a time of impact for this ship that has been so steady through 230 years and the options for avoiding disaster are becoming progressively more limited.  What can been done when it appears a steadily larger portion of the ship’s population is trading responsibility for security and can not be counted on to work together and consider some sacrifice to right the ship?   Our educational process, which for several centuries has been anchored on the basic instruction of what makes the rights of an individual American unique and to be defended, has over the last decades become mute to the progressive ignorance of these American principles, and has traded them for propagandist causes and the shilling of victimhood.  It has permeated our culture to the point that the very pinnacle of leadership, the President himself, a supposed constitutional law professor, anointed the “smartest man” ever to hold the office, proves himself daily to be inexplicably ignorant of the very constitution he pledged to uphold, protect, and defend.

     The Constitution of the United States was a hard won, painstakingly researched and vetted document of specifically enumerated powers that left a template of easily understandable checks and balances to, above all, limit the powers of the rulers and preserve the powers of the ruled to navigate their own lives.  With few exceptions, it has proved to the world that even in a sprawling country of hundreds of millions, a steady and common sense course can be navigated despite so many competing interests.  In ship of state terms, it has until the very recent past seemed unsinkable, because the population at least had a basic understanding about how such a document protected them, and the government, though tempted, always bowed to the document’s ultimate logic.

    Now we face the unsteady decks of a 16 trillion dollar debt and a spending fetish that allows a self imposed spending limit barely a year before it has been consumed and must embarrassingly be increased because of a complete inability to accept its limitations.  We face the gushing waters of debt pouring into the hold, and the bilge pumps in the form of exhaustive but at the same time insufficient taxation unable to keep with the inexorable flood.  Most insultingly, rather than turn our damaged ship toward the safety of shore our leaders head it out to a deeper, more dangerous sea, as if they were free of the laws of nature, immune to the risk, and ignorant of the fate.

     One can only hope that on this ship of ours there are those of sterner stuff, who will see the crisis for what it is, and restore stability.  I just fear that the majority have forgotten what the original voyage was all about, and rather than man the pumps will look to their own safety and exit strategy.  What a sad loss for mankind it would be – because she was, and still could be, the most beautiful of ships.