We peasants look around at the current trajectory of American society and, if conservative, wonder how things can just carry on this way much longer. As Peggy Noonan noted in a very interesting essay in 2005, liberals like Teddy Kennedy are instinctively aware of this as well. Our elites are simply trying to grab up everything they can before it all comes crashing down:

Do people fear the wheels are coming off the trolley? Is this fear widespread? A few weeks ago I was reading Christopher Lawford's lovely, candid and affectionate remembrance of growing up in a particular time and place with a particular family, the Kennedys, circa roughly 1950-2000. It's called "Symptoms of Withdrawal." At the end he quotes his Uncle Teddy. Christopher, Ted Kennedy and a few family members had gathered one night and were having a drink in Mr. Lawford's mother's apartment in Manhattan. Teddy was expansive. If he hadn't gone into politics he would have been an opera singer, he told them, and visited small Italian villages and had pasta every day for lunch. "Singing at la Scala in front of three thousand people throwing flowers at you. Then going out for dinner and having more pasta." Everyone was laughing. Then, writes Mr. Lawford, Teddy "took a long, slow gulp of his vodka and tonic, thought for a moment, and changed tack. 'I'm glad I'm not going to be around when you guys are my age.' I asked him why, and he said, 'Because when you guys are my age, the whole thing is going to fall apart.' "

Mr. Lawford continued, "The statement hung there, suspended in the realm of 'maybe we shouldn't go there.' Nobody wanted to touch it. After a few moments of heavy silence, my uncle moved on."

Lawford thought his uncle might be referring to their family--that it might "fall apart." But reading, one gets the strong impression Teddy Kennedy was not talking about his family but about . . . the whole ball of wax, the impossible nature of everything, the realities so daunting it seems the very system is off the tracks.

And--forgive me--I thought: If even Teddy knows . . .

Now Peggy isn't paranoid, and she certainly doesn't see a conspiracy behind everything. In terms of her politics, she's not particularly conservative. She usually just argues from common-sense. Read the whole essay, but I'd say common-sense right now dictates that the wheels are coming off and that the elites know it and are trying to insulate themselves from what's ahead. Almost everyone I talk to with any serious money is aware of this. One of my friends who's very conservative is planning on selling his place and buying farmland in Oregon. He used to work in the elite side of the Navy back in the 80s, so he can probably best be described as slightly crazy and paranoid. I would expect this behavior out of him. But now one of our liberal friends is asking him how to get armed and is expressing concerns about the future of Los Angeles as well. My father-in-law, down in San Diego, when we just happened to briefly discuss the border in passing, said that he wanted to move up to Pebble Beach, further away from the problem. This is after he already commented that "all of the white people (in San Diego) live north of the 8 (fwy)," and moved himself there. He's not particularly conservative, and his views on race are quite different from mine. Usually, like any other business owner, if you mention the Mexican invasion, he'll just scowl and repeat the tired mantra, "They're just doing jobs Americans won't do."

The US has been through hard times in the past, of course. Just look at the Great Depression. The difference between then and now is that roughly 1 in 8 people in the country now are either legal or illegal immigrants , and that's if you accept the 20 million figure for illegals(I believe it to be much higher), and believe that blacks don't largely believe themselves to be a separate nation themselves. Mexicans are for the most part not loyal to the United States, even if they are citizens. They announce their loyalty to their "Raza" at almost every opportunity.

I suppose what I'm trying to get at is that average Americans themselves must stop pretending like our elites in Washington and elsewhere care about us, that an invasion is not an invasion, and living like things will just continue as they are right now indefinitely; "Precious treasure and oil are in a wise man’s dwelling, but a foolish man devours it." (Prov 21:20) Likewise, our treacherous elites, must remember that, "The Righteous One observes the house of the wicked; he throws the wicked down to ruin." (Prov 21:12)