Compare and contrast.
America, then:
America, now:
America the Beautiful to America the Beastly in eighty years. You think this is frivolous, if amusing, griping. Ugliness in body and of spirit, and the crooked celebration thereof, is a defining feature of exhausted, declining cultures. Pampered softness has made Americans, and especially American women, ugly, crass, and teetering on the brink of mass insanity.
What do I mean by ugliness of spirit?
This, for example…
The nation has taken a wholesale turn away from beauty and toward ugliness. We embrace the ugly, castigate those “beauty bitter clingers”, and rejoice at the death of judgement. All the while our spirits and our bodies turn into formless pulp, manifesting our new beliefs, and we become ripe for defeat by more vital outsiders.
A little bit of hardship is good for a civilization’s, as well as a person’s, soul. Hardship will likely return to us, but when that time comes the difference then will be that we won’t be prepared to meet it head on.