Slipping Away

You can feel it if you’re honest about it. Something in this country is slipping away.

There’s a feeling you get sometimes driving an old Mississippi highway at dusk. The light falls sideways through the pines, soft and golden, and for a second, you can almost believe nothing’s changed. The same red clay shoulders. The same courthouse squares. The same white steeples rising over towns that were old before most of us were born.

But look closer.

The hardware store’s gone. The newspaper office is dark. The barber pole doesn’t spin anymore. The men who used to argue politics while drinking coffee at daylight aren’t sitting there now. Most of them are buried. Their stories went with them.

Older America is passing away.

Not all at once. Just one funeral at a time. One closed storefront at a time. One unspoken assumption at a time.

There was a country, not so long ago, where most folks agreed on a few simple things. You worked. You went to church, or at least respected the people who did. You believed this was a good country. Imperfect, sure. But still good. Worth defending. You didn’t have to explain why you loved it. That part was understood.

It had a center of gravity. A common understanding of right and wrong. About duty and freedom. And about what it meant to be an American.

That center feels looser now.

An Irish poet once wrote, “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.” He was writing about his own unsettled age, but the words travel. He spoke of a widening gyre, of a falcon circling so far out it could no longer hear the falconer. That’s what cultural drift feels like. Not a sudden collapse, but a slow turning outward, until the voice that once guided us grows faint. When a people lose their common footing, they don’t always notice at first. They just wake up one day and realize the old center isn’t pulling like it used to.

It’s happening here. Right now. And it will soon get much worse.

Because our present arguments aren’t just about taxes, roads, or who ought to be president. They’re about whether the old assumptions we shared were ever good at all. Whether the tales we told about ourselves were noble or naïve. Whether the past deserves gratitude or only suspicion.

And sadly, America won’t ever be the same.

The children growing up now don’t remember rotary phones, three television channels, or front porches filled with neighbors on summer nights. Their town square glows in their pocket. Making matters worse, their arguments never end as the world grows more unstable, louder, and restless.

Yes, something is ending. You can feel it if you pay attention.

But something else is beginning.

Every generation inherits a house it didn’t build. The wise repair it. The foolish tear it down without knowing what holds it up. But the brave do something different. They walk the foundation before they start swinging a hammer.

If older America is fading, then our job isn’t to sit around mourning it. It’s to decide what’s worth carrying forward.

And what’s worth carrying forward are the old anchors that always kept this republic steady when the winds picked up: the conviction that our rights don’t flow from the whim of some distant office, but exist before any government ever stamps a seal; the stubborn belief that the law must weigh the same on the banker and the bricklayer, on the powerful and the plain; the habit of looking a man in the eye, shaking his hand, and meaning what you say; and the calm recognition that freedom without self restraint isn’t liberty at all, but slow decay.

Like our Constitution, those things aren’t relics. They’re load-bearing walls.

Change is coming whether we like it or not, unfortunately. Demographics shift. Technology outruns wisdom. Culture bends in ways our grandparents never imagined.

But a country isn’t just its trends. It’s its character.

So prepare for what’s next.

Teach your children to stand on their own two feet. Teach them to work with their hands. Teach them to speak plainly. Teach them to pray and to defend themselves if they must. Raise them to be self-reliant, not dependent on distant bureaucrats and disgusting politicians who’ve never set foot on your street.

Build guardrails close to home. Strengthen your towns. Support your sheriffs. Elect local officials who understand that Washington doesn’t get to run every classroom, every business, every corner of your life. Push power back where you can see it and hold it accountable.

Washington will not restrain itself. It has to be pushed back. Forced to yield ground it was never meant to occupy. Power must retreat to its proper sphere, back to the states, back to the towns, and back to the people who actually live with the consequences of its decisions.

And the same goes for the busybodies who would harness the machinery of government to impose their latest vision of earthly perfection. Utopias built by decree always demand obedience, and obedience always comes at the expense of freedom. If self-government is to survive, centralized power must be reminded, firmly and without apology, where its limits lie.

Folks, from time to time, a generation of Americans gets severely tested. That time is coming. Be prepared. If the center feels like it’s drifting, then be part of what steadies it.

Older America may be passing.

But what comes next doesn’t have to spin apart.

It can hold, if we do.