The fall of Rome

I recently spent some vacation time on the west coast of Italy. In Rome, I was awed, as most tourists are, by the 2000 year old remnants of the Roman Empire: The Forum, the Pantheon, and of course the Coliseum. For a thousand years, from roughly 600BC to 400AD, Rome was the height of enlightenment, of art, architecture, technology, science and political freedoms. And then the Barbarians sacked Rome, and the Dark Ages descended.

Walking around Rome, walking around Pompeii, the shadows of that great ancient civilization stand as a warning for today: The US is at the peak of its power, at the forefront of technology, architecture, art and science. This country has been around for just 235 years, a blink of the eye on the Roman scale. Will we surpass the Romans, will we last as a culture even half as long as the Romans? Or will we repeat the mistakes of the Romans, weaken ourselves from within, and be over-run by our enemies? Given the current direction of the country, it was fairly disconcerting to see the scattered remains of a civilization that achieved even greater things in its time than we have in ours.

With that sense of foreboding imparted from the ancient ruins, my vacation next took me to Mallorca, an island off the coast of Spain. And sitting just outside the harbor of the city of Palma on the island of Mallorca, flying the American flag, was the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise – with its flight deck full of aircraft. Nothing lifts the spirits like the sight of US power floating by. We may be moving in the wrong direction at the moment, but we’re not done yet.