Wedded to illusion.

The 2008 financial crash originated with a housing bubble.

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There is a similar pension bubble rising as well. There is perhaps as much as $6 trillion owed in retirement pledges to Americans, $500 billion in California alone. That tab under present conditions simply cannot be met.

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Then there is the higher-education bubble . . . .

You can continue to believe that all is well, that highly intelligent and patriotic Americans knew what they were doing when they set things on their present course, and that those compassionate geniuses know exactly what they are doing when they run up trillion dollar deficits and flush a functioning, highly effective health care system down the drain.

You can believe that Muslims yearn to breathe the heady air of freedom, contribute to the greater glory of Western civilization, and leave their repulsive, murderous "faith" behind in the stink hole places they left behind. You can believe that importing millions of Muslims into the West is the veritable course of wisdom and that allowing millions and millions and millions and millions of illegal immigrants to flood unrestricted across our southern border and take jobs from American citizens makes stone economic and cultural sense.

You can believe that the genius of the Constitution that we had in 1791 directs and guides the Nation in the way of freedom so that we can live free of venal and clueless officials and legislators. You can believe that Supreme Court justices apply the magic rules they learned in law school to faithfully interpret the Constitution in the most neutral and objective way imaginable, turning away from base politics and corrupt inventions like Superman from kryptonite.

And you can believe that the Nation is not soaked in vicious, mendacious leftist assaults on decency, freedom of speech, the rule of law, Western civilization, and the Constitution itself.

Or you can cast off your civilization-destroying complacency and begin to inform yourself about how you and your fellow citizens have turned your back on freedom and sold out for an impossible cornucopia of goodies and "rights" that can only be paid for by transparent fiscal insanity, legally sanctioned theft from productive and energetic fellow citizens, and selling the Statue of Liberty to foreigners who hate our guts.

Apparently that's an impossibility for huge numbers of the American electorate, to stop acting like children, stop swallowing lies, and start acting like citizens who make up their own minds instead of waiting for "educated" and "experienced" people to tell you what to do, when to do it, and how much to pay in the process.

Thus, Alexander Solzhenitsyn's "pitiless crowbar of events" is in our stars. When an awake and alert society of free men could have changed the nation's course, it chose to sleep until that crowbar crashes down to forever change something that was truly magnificent.

"Bubbles Galore In Lives Lived In The Abstract." By Victor Davis Hanson, Investor's Business Daily, 2/4/11.