Friedrich Nietzsche once said, "God is Dead!" This was not an act of heresy, sedition, or anything that would put him in the canto reserved for traitors and mutineers. He meant that the fear of God that drove man to do good works had failed. Man doesn't feel the consequences of their actions, or they don't feel them until their judgment day. People who believe God is a coping mechanism don't have the drive to good, yet pray when they fear His/Her wrath. God, the living phenomenon that no human will ever be able to contemplate, is not dead. But God, the symbol, is dead.
So, when I say, "America is Dead," I am not issuing a threat or a warning. All I'm saying is the ideals of the Framers, freedom, diversity, unity, truth, justice, "The American Way", "The American Dream", and all the other things that made us Americans is dead. Sure, we went to war to prevent the use of "weapons of mass destruction," in an act of self-defense. That is the key word, self-defense. America went to war to protect itself, and only itself, from destruction. We didn't send soldiers to foreign lands when others were in danger, but when our skins are threatened we're Johnny On-The-Spot. Even more to the point, America invades countries to rid the world of nuclear weapons and yet, we have thousands. The American Dream becomes the American Hypocrisy, and we are no different than the "terror" we claim to be fighting. You, as readers, may notice that I use "we" when referring to America in the above paragraphs. When 9/11 occurred, I had no complaints that we had nukes to defend ourselves. That is because I find myself just as hypocritical and no better than those who pull the trigger.
A colleague of mine met my argument with his own theory that America was never born. That the promises of freedom and unity were "empty promises" and the ideal of the American Dream was a complete hoax. I agree with him indefinitely. But, there in lies the rub. If the American Dream is not real, why do our leaders impose it upon the general public so much? They use the American symbol to win you over to their side, democrat, republican, liberal, conservative, and independent alike. Despite the empty promises of freedom and unity made by our forefathers, they created a symbol, the American symbol. Today, that symbol is manipulated to serve some men, not all men.
