The United States is compromised. It becomes more and more like one of the European countries that conservatives have been fond of pointing at and laughing but worse.

Teenage girls can be raped in public bathrooms with absolutely no justice while their fathers are expected to just grin and bear it. Thugs can steal anything from any store at any time and are not prosecuted. People can desecrate the food that their employer pays them to serve, post it on their social media, and laugh about it. Employers now own their employees to the point that they can force you to have unwanted medical procedures or they can fire you. Every bit of our history is being destroyed, stricken from the country that birthed it. The founders of our nation are smeared and erased. Our God is mocked openly by our own countries "elected" leadership. We allow any degeneracy at any time openly in the street but a young man cannot defend his own life without a murder trial. If a criminal is robbing your home and they are injured during this act they can sue you for negligence.

You must think twice defending your own home and property and family, worried that you will be sent to prison and your family left destitute; but the people who come to harm your home and hearth are applauded and set free.

How much further into a corner can we be? We were taught "This land is your land, this land is my land" as children, sitting on the rug at the feet of kindergarten teachers all across the United States in the same way the children of the Soviet Union were taught songs about the hundred year revolution. The public education system teaches children not to defend themselves but to run to an authority for every problem in their life; zero tolerance for violence policy means that defending yourself from someone punching your face in will garner you the same punishment as your attacker. This policy in schools is the same policy being pushed everywhere in the United States, to defend yourself is a criminal act.

Apparently not only "This land is your land" but it can never be my land, the land is your land and the fruits of my labor are yours to take and the homes of our aging parents and grandparents are stolen by bankers through reverse mortgages utilized to pay for medical care in an insurance profit system that is at the same time predatory and parasitic, bleeding people slowly until it smells weakness then bleeding you completely of your savings and property. Then your family home will either be destroyed for high rise rent controlled housing to change the demographics of your city or sold to corporations bent on owning every inch of farmland in the country. There are places in the United States passing laws where a person can break into your home and steal goods worth up to one thousand dollars without prosecution and they call that the redistribution of wealth. It isn't wealth; it is the end result of labor, hours of service to unforgiving jobs that take up 40% of your life, hours of toil in order to buy some American Dream idea perverted by years of bait and switch tactics. "The boss makes a dollar, I make a dime, that's why I use the bathroom on company time."

Where do we go from here? It isn't one election compromised, it is a system of voting compromised over and over for 300 years until the people who fake elections feel like they do not have to try as hard to hide their corruption as the did 10 years ago, 50 years ago, 200 years ago. Boss Tweed in Tammany Hall knew the real truth, that votes don't win elections, vote counters do. You can get the whole vote out in your state and lose because you did not stop to think who was doing the counting.

How long have we been in decline? Were we already in trouble at the beginning, huge forces like France and England utilizing a budding country as a pawn, putting the blindfold on Columbia and spinning her until she was dizzy and laughing as she tried to pint the tail on the donkey? Was the American Revolution England's Vietnam War, the signal to anyone watching that things had changed and they did not have to care so much what the country controlling their goods, services and very lives wanted anymore?

The pawns of the powerful running wild in the streets for years destroying statues and monuments have given way to local governments destroying monuments and changing the names on the front of our schools for our own good. The names Washington, Lincoln and Jefferson have been deemed oppressive. Whose name will go up? What will go on the sign? What will the school mascot be but a scared little lamb hiding it's face in the corner of the fence and bleating for a nanny state?

A pope once said "We would say that, through some mysterious crack—no, it’s not mysterious; through some crack, the smoke of Satan has entered the Church of God." This is apt to our situation, in a sense. The difference is that we don't just smell smoke that has entered our country, we can see the flames.

Rome is burning.