(Originally penned and posted on October 28, ARSH 2012.)

There are still people, millions and millions of them, who honestly believe that this nation, economy, culture, society, whatever you want to call it, is salvageable and can be turned around. There are still people who, after all of this, still think that ELECTIONS and Washington D.C. will lead us all to the Elysian Fields and pastures of plenty. These people honestly believe that Mitt Romney can and will “fix everything”, even though Mitt Romney has actually implemented EVERYTHING people are screaming about Obama attempting, such as RomneyCare (which IS ObamaCare), insurance mandates, contraception mandates, zero-copay abortion on demand, sodomite marriage and assault rifle bans, and has yet to even acknowledge the mathematical impossibility of government spending. These people still believe that Darryl Issa and Allen West (and now the new psychopath politician flavors of the month like Ted Cruz) will suddenly re-assert the Rule of Law on November 7th, or something. You know, just like they swore up and down that these same people would “stop Obama” and “turn Washington around” after the 2010 elections.

Anyone who still believes this, very simply, has their head up their wazoo to their shoulders.

Not only will Mitt Romney, Darryl Issa, Michelle Bachmann and Allen West NOT do ANYTHING of any substance if “elected”, they CAN’T do anything. It is already too far gone. The economy is MATHEMATICALLY IMPOSSIBLE to fix. $222 trillion in unfunded government mandates over the next 75 years. At minimum $1.4 quadrillion in global derivatives exposure. Thousands of MANPADS and millions of pounds of American weaponry are now in the hands of the Muslim Brotherhood / al Qaeda thanks to Obama’s Libyan gunrunning. Iran will have an atomic arsenal, if they don’t have one already, either self-produced or procured from Pakistan or the old Soviet arsenal. 60 million babies have already been killed. That blood is spilled. You can’t ever bring them back.

Now to the point of this essay. God’s wrath cannot be assuaged at this point because we, the people of the former United States and Western Civilization, are the most guilty, culpable, iniquitous society to ever exist by many orders of magnitude. In terms of our guilt, we are far, far guiltier than the people of late Rome. There were aspects of late Roman culture that were prima facie worse than our culture, specifically the torture blood sports – not that we aren’t racing towards that at a dead sprint ourselves – but we are far guiltier than the late Romans, and thus deserve far, far worse. And that is exactly what we are going to get.

How can we be orders of magnitude guiltier than the late Romans, or any other culture for that matter?

Because we are willfully ignorant due to extreme intellectual and, especially, moral laziness. If there was ever a group to whom the words “YOU SHOULD HAVE KNOWN BETTER” applied, it is us. And we have absolutely, positively no excuse whatsoever for our ignorance.

I can list five explicit reasons why:

1. We were a free culture. This isn’t Saudi Arabia or North Korea, so save me your bee-ess excuses. We have been free to read ANYTHING, learn ANYTHING, subscribe to ANYTHING. This has been the most licensed culture in all of human history. Male, female, white, brown, old, young, you name it. There hasn’t even been a military draft in this country for forty years. We have had the near-universal societal leisure to pursue and ponder anything and everything. And we have chosen Honey Boo Boo, the Kardashians, and mentally retarded giants who chase balls in stadiums like dogs. We have chosen to be ignorant losers who revel and glory in our own inhuman stupidity, when we could have chosen to be excellent.

 2.  We are wealthy. We are the materially wealthiest culture – across the board – ever to exist. In all other cultures poverty has meant starvation, disease brought on by filth, and daily hard labor just to survive. In this culture, “poverty” means that your TV is under 42″ and that your ObamaPhone is running Android Version 3, not Version 4. No one starves to death here. People don’t die from ingesting human fecal matter in their drinking water. The necessities are totally taken care of, and thus people are free to spend the vast majority of their lives at leisure. Even our jobs are leisure, because we all get to choose what it is that we do for a living. Neither family ties nor the government have mandated, under pain of death, what any of us do vocationally. Whatever it is that you are doing or have done vocationally, you chose it and consented to it, and you were free to pursue your own interests. Since our culture has been so wealthy, most people have been able to support themselves with a 40 hour workweek, leaving in excess of 40 hours per week for pure leisure, free to pursue and ponder anything and everything.

3.  We could have been educated. We are not. Most people in this culture, even though education was possible, are totally uneducated, and contra-educated. I would classify this culture as “barely literate”. People can read and sound out a small core vocabulary of words, but there is very little comprehension of what is read, and that which is read is either ignorant, insipid or morally degenerated. What people are almost universally incapable of and totally unwilling to do is think for themselves – not just to be spoonfed “answers”, but to actually ponder and parse information, to independently synthesize data, make connections, and to think through logical progressions. I don’t care how many bee-ess college degrees you have, because all “education” today consists of is pumping and dumping information onto multiple-choice tests and occasionally faking a short-answer or occasional paper. That isn’t education. That’s beta pack animals learning the gestures of submission to the alpha. This culture is operating just epsilon above the animal plane – and those are the “college educated” people. The inner cities are operating on the purely animal level. But we COULD have been the most truly educated culture ever.

4.  Every single one of you reading this has the sum of human knowledge literally at his fingertips. The most damning aspect of the internet won’t be the pornography, I suspect. How can I possibly say that?  Because the internet pins every single one of us into a moral corner because it completely removes any ability to argue that “I didn’t know – I didn’t have the information.”

I gave a priest a thorough rhetorical beating a few years ago because he said something really stupid in a public and official setting that could have been disproved and illuminated in about seven seconds with a simple google, or any search engine, query. Whether you are a priest or a professor, or a politician or a wild-eyed blogger, there is NO EXCUSE for making incorrect public statements, no matter how trivial. If you speak, you have a grave moral obligation to be right, that is to speak the Truth. The cascading consequences of factual and moral errors are massive and horrifying, and we will only see those consequences at the General Judgment. When you have the sum of human knowledge at your fingertips, and thus the potential to extrapolate BEYOND the sum of human knowledge, thus expanding the domain of human knowledge itself; when you have been given that ability and are still so lazy that you can’t even get the already-known facts-at-your-fingertips right, there will be hell to pay for that sloth.

As an aside, I am at this point reminded of Leon Panetta’s lying excuse that no help was sent into Benghazi because they “didn’t have enough information.” As if a live, real-time video feed from a drone circling directly overhead “wasn’t enough information”. Leon Panetta is lying, and justice will be done upon him in this life or the next, but everyone else in this culture who tries to claim that “we didn’t know” will deserve exactly the same wrath.

5.  Finally, we have far more guilt and culpability than any other culture because we WERE a Christian culture and turned our back on God with full knowledge and conscious forethought. The Romans of the 4th century were pagans who either knew very little or nothing at all of Christ. They had the Natural Law as their only guide. We, in the starkest of contrasts, have Christ Himself, physically present in the Eucharist, with our culture *allegedly* built on Him, and yet we have utterly denied and rejected Him and have reverted and descended all the way back to the worst pagan cultures, and in some ways have plumbed even greater depths of depravity. The only revolt that is worse in enormity and scope than ours against God is the revolt of Lucifer. Even the Jews of the Old Testament in all of their many episodes of falling away from God, didn’t have the knowledge of Christ (obviously, because the Incarnation had not yet happened) and did not have the Physical Presence of God Himself to be taken into their own bodies, in the Eucharist.

We have nailed Christ to the Cross, and when He looks at us and asks us why, we have the unmitigated gall to say, “It’s not my fault. I didn’t see You there. You should have spoken up.”

WE are going to burn like no other culture has burned before, including Rome, because we have, by far, the most guilt. Ignorance due to laziness in the face of unprecedented freedom and license, wealth and leisure time, potential education, technology and availability of information, and the knowledge of and physical presence of Christ Himself is why we must and we WILL burn. No one has ever, ever deserved it more.