How does one go about finding out how sick he is? Medical technicians study a drop or two of his blood and immediately, almost magically, the wellness/illness factor becomes clear.

How does one discern if his car is ill? He does not put one end of a screwdriver on the top of the running motor and his ear to the other end of the screwdriver so he can hear what the problem is. Yes, they did it that way! After all, not many things can go wrong with a Model T Ford! Not today: a computer is plugged into a receptacle under the dash, and a tell-tale read-out is printed. (A mechanic told me recently that a well-known, mid-priced SUV has forty-seven computer systems on it.)

What about a health-check on a civilization? We all know they have life-cycles and, inevitably, at least so far as we can gather from the history of civilizations, they cease to exist. The arc from birth to death is often slow, but it is inevitable.

Here are some evidences of the state of the health of western civilization which is now, roughly, two thousand years old, and centered in Europe and North America.

1. You know things are not good when you hear the chant—as early as the late 1950s—on university campuses all over the country, “Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho, Western Civ’s Gotta Go!”
2. You know things are not good for a civilization when it stands aside while uncounted millions of people from alien (yes, that’s the word) cultures swarm into it unimpeded. The death-gurgle has set in when such a fact is not immediately seen, identified, and responded to, as an act of war.
3. One aspect of that pathology, perhaps the basal cause of it, is the almost absolute lack of resolution to defend your civilization, screaming one’s lack of will to save it. The west’s response to such things is the boy who was threatened and knew he had a serious problem: he was afraid to fight and too fat to run.
4. You know something’s wrong at the heart of things when the national media are desperate for you to hear what is wrong with your country instead of what is right, or ever has been right, with it. No people anywhere, ever, built a perfect society, but we are told incessantly only about the inevitable pathologies of our country.
5. You know things are problematic when your cultural elites tell you that all societies are morally equal, and yours is no better than any other, including the prison known as North Korea or Somalia where 97% of all females are genitally mutilated, or any one of a dozen countries where slavery openly exists, or where women have only a modicum of personal rights, if any.
6. You know that is emergency-room time for your country when your president stands close to the place where your civilization was born and, after vigorously defending its very existence, hears his speech labeled as “dark” and “white-supremacist” and “alt-right” and is called out for having a sufficiently poor taste to mention God. Honestly!
7. When the front-line protectors of the general citizenry—the military and the officers of the law—are derided by the national media with impunity, the deadly societal disease of anarchy approaches a lethal level in the body politic.
8. You know things are problematic when many of your cultural elites call for the abandonment of your articles of incorporation, the United States Constitution, which your forebearers were willing to die for, and for which hundreds of thousands actually did die.
9. Things are serious when no citizen can remember the last fraudulent government official—there have been many—who has served a single day in prison for his or her fraud.

At the risk of sounding hopelessly naïve, I must see that, even in such societal distress, although I am but one cell in my civilization, I can choose to be either a healthy or a cancerous one, and my choice will affect my entire country for illness or wellness. My choice. And yours.

Bill Anderson
Grapevine, Texas