Survival of our Nation

Look at history. Do the math. The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through this sequence:
From bondage to spiritual faith;

• From spiritual faith to great courage;
• From courage to liberty;
• From liberty to abundance;
• From abundance to selfishness;
• From selfishness to complacency;
• From complacency to apathy;
• From apathy to dependency;
• From dependency back to bondage.

Today, we as a nation, are standing on the brink of that last shift from dependency to bondage. For a couple of generations, the government has pushed very hard to corral segments of our society in prisons of dependency by promoting entitlement thinking. As soon as a person begins to feel entitled, he (or she) steps into the trap of dependency. As soon as enough folks are in that trap, they are a society in bondage. 

This intentional entrapment of our people has been disguised as altruism, charity, compassion, humanitarianism, love,  and all sorts of other pretty concepts with heartwarming labels. People who are guided more by their hearts than their minds are easily swept into the current of this kind of thinking, being led like so many rodents by charismatic Pied Pipers who wield a winning smile and smooth words. When those playing the tune end up in positions of power, the stage is set to make the shift from dependency to bondage for the entire nation. We are there now.

I believe one of the most important things for our leaders to have (along with integrity) is a sound understanding of history. If, in the rush to remake America into something new and different, we refuse to look back and see what used to work that made this country so successful that it became the envy of the world, then we will never be able to duplicate that success. And if we refuse to study the policies that were failures (like the New Deal), we are doomed to repeat what failed before.

So how does this relate to wilderness and urban survival? Take a look at countries that experimented with socialism and you'll see populations struggling to survive, and eventually risking everything to escape. Those escape attempts are survival incidents. When a government becomes so powerful that it can promise to give you everything you need, it has become powerful enough to take away everything you have. Study history, and you'll see clearly how this becomes a survival situation. And if you don't think it can happen to you, right here, then you're not understanding the lessons of the past.