I don't want to be accused with painting with a big brush, but we live in a survival of the fittest world. Sure there were many peaceful indian tribes and cultures and others who were more warlike, but the bottomline is they all were cultures in a state of arrested development.

In Africa today we see villages that haven't evolved a whit over four hundred years. The indians encountered by Amerigo Vespucci in 1497 had not changed much, if at all after a hundred years when Captain John Smith arrived in 1607.

The only progress in Indian cultures arrived after intermingling with the European settlers. The Europeans got in return....smoking.

To be quite frank, most Indian cultures looked as though they were in decline from what their ancestors had achieved in South America with pyramids and temples. They had completely lost the skills their ancestors once possessed. All most had left were a hodge-podge of spirit gods and a tradition of sacrifice, but the temples, monuments and cities were gone.

If a culture wants to cling to traditions that's fine. If they want to believe their ways were superior to the colonists that arrived, that's fine too. It's self delusion - and a hell of an escape mechanism, but that's their choice. We have plenty of folkings drowning their sorrows on reservations, blaming their ills on something that happened long before they were born.

Five hundred years from now I hope no descendant of Islam will be looking back with fondness about the days of suicide bombers and ritual mass murder. I hope it will go quietly to oblivion alongside Christianity and anyone else who worships and obeys commands from some invisible blood-thirsty god. What's more I hope no future educational institution in these regions will pretend that "all cultures are equal" and try to paint the suicide bombers as victims of European/Israeli "betrayal".

There are arrested cultures and peoples out there. Folks who don't change and have only the mental development to sustain the status quo. Others move forward, and onward. They don't look back to the past and pretend things were better or that barbarism is somehow superior to a technocratic society. Everytime we let our schools demonstrate "empathy" and "alternative viewpoints" or attempt to bash our own culture, we as a culture are letting the teachers cripple our future generation.

It's no big surprise that we accomplished the most (1880-1970) during a period are children were taught that they are the best, brightest and luckiest children in the world. There were no guilt trips, self doubt, or fear mongering as is done in the class room today and for the past twenty years. The result of this self-doubt, America is the bad guy BS, has been that WE are becoming an arrested culture.

Look at the evidence all around us. Children and adults spend months of each year watching tv and playing games. The big news every year for the past decade has been when the NEW upgraded game machine is coming out! Gamecube! Xbox! NintendoDS! Wii!

America is in decline. I have no doubts about that. Economically, industrial capacity, worker productivity and average IQ - all down.

When classes start "mourning" the arrival of the colonists in our schools, and when folks here mostly see little or nothing wrong with that, I know it's probably too late for America.

I'll still be found shouting from the rooftops and holding a torch to inspire, but from this position I see far more torches held aloft in places like China.

Our edge is gone.
Our youth are pacified and indoctrinated against American industry.
Our future...
...in a survival of the fittest world...

...looks pretty bleak.

And on that cheery note, I'll sign off.

;-)