A MARINE'S LAMENT

A Marine’s Lament: How Greed and Amoral Power Destroyed America

I grew up in America. At eighteen, I joined the United States Marine Corps and swore an oath to protect and defend the Constitution. I served my country as an officer, raised my family, paid my taxes, lived as a law-abiding citizen, and voted sometimes uncertainly, but always out of duty.

When I retired, I sharpened my awareness of history and current events. I began to write books, essays, and blog posts to make sense of what I saw unfolding. What I discovered is as simple as it is devastating: we were right once, had it once, and lost it.

The country I pledged to defend has been betrayed from within. Our inheritance, liberty, democracy, and moral leadership were squandered. In its place, authoritarianism crept in, wrapped in the flag, echoing the rhetoric of freedom even as it dismantled its substance. What began as a subtle corrosion became outright seizure: Nazis in new uniforms, clutching the levers of power.

We had one chance to stop the descent. Joe Biden, a decent man with a steady hand, offered a reprieve. But he faltered, and the moment slipped through our fingers. Now we are on the defensive, weaker than ever, and history suggests we will not prevail. We lack the power, the unity, and the courage that once defined us.

It is painful to admit that our undoing has not come solely from foreign enemies or ideological rivals. It has come from within, from our character's very weaknesses that we refused to confront. Greed, self-aggrandizement, and moral bankruptcy are the forces that hollowed us out. Wealth became our measure of worth. Power became our substitute for virtue. Truth became optional.

History will not remember us kindly. It will not be the foreign wars, the pandemics, or even dictatorships that sealed our fate. It will be our willingness to trade principle for profit, to accept lies when they suited us, and to abandon morality when it was inconvenient.

Greed and amorality, not famine, plague, or even nuclear war, will be recorded as the ultimate causes of our demise. And the bitterest truth of all is that this was preventable. We could have handed our progeny a stronger, freer, more just nation. Instead, we leave them a shattered inheritance, squandered by our selfishness and refusal to heed history lessons.

I write these words as a Marine, citizen, father, and grandfather. They are not words of surrender, but of reckoning. If history is to condemn us, let it at least record that some of us saw clearly what was happening and refused to look away.

William James Spriggs