That was Then: Soon This Will be Too -

  American Thinker   "Many of us feel like we’re swimming against a torrent that is rushing toward a massive waterfall. We can hear the water crashing over the edge and slamming onto the rocks below, and it’s getting louder and louder.

"We look to history for guidance and find that at first glance it’s no help at all. It merely reminds us that empires fall and usually due to the stupidity, and/or perfidy of those in charge, which is terrifyingly all too familiar. But let’s narrow that focus a little. No other nation has ever been built solely on a principle -- that each human being has an inalienable right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” It is also true that no nation in history has maintained a constitution anywhere near as long as has the United States. Ours has been functioning, more or less, as intended, for over 234 years, whereas other nation's average is just 17 years. We must have gotten something right. 

"We can also look back at our history and find times when things looked this grim, and yet, we came through, we won. What chance did we have against England back in the 18th century? We had to be nuts to think we could successfully divorce ourselves from the most powerful nation on earth at the time. We weren’t even a full-fledged country yet. We had no standing army, no organized system of taxation, very little in the way of infrastructure, and only the most rudimentary methods of communication. Our forefathers had only three things going for them: the British soldiers were 3,000 miles from home; King George III was mentally unstable; and these first Americans took God seriously -- and had since the early 1600s, and it doesn’t take much looking to see that God controls history.

"Let’s look back at the Civil War. How hopeless that had to be for everyone involved. After all, it was fought on our soil, so, like the War for Independence, the battles would be fought in people’s backyards, their schools, and churches turned into field hospitals, the soldiers billeted in their homes. Medicine had yet to catch up to weaponry, so both sides suffered more casualties than ever before at a time when surgeons were not capable of mending soldiers -- they could only saw off the injured limbs. The horror is almost unimaginable. And yet, right prevailed, the Union was saved, the slaves were freed, and the country kept on growing.". . .