Yes, but the opportunity is for both sides, and not necessarily equal either.
Alisa, I thought you were the optimist around here. I'm depressed enough already; if you've gone over the edge, too, we're doomed!
Laird, I think that you may be confusing me with Alice, my almost-namesake:-)
BTW, I am not so sure how much of an optimist Alice really is. On a recent thread she assured us that everything will turn out fine, just as soon as we go through another Waterloo and/or Stalingrad. Maybe both she and I just realists, only she tends to be in a better mood than me:-)
"I am not so sure how much of an optimist Alice really is."
I had never thought of myself as an optimist until hearing some of the recent defeatism around these parts.
According to Beevor's book, the surrounded Germans continued fighting at Stalingrad until they ran out of ammunition -- they had run out of food earlier, and many had died from starvation while the battle raged on. But when the shooting stopped, about 10,000 Russian civilians emerged from the ruins of the city, including about 1,000 children. The author does not spend much time on how those civilians survived the months of privation, but other comments in the book make it likely that cannibalism was part of the explanation.
If one notes that in extremis human beings will eat their dead to survive, does that make one an optimist or a pessimist?
Whatever happens next, I think the wheel will turn, and the human race will survive & progress -- just as we have been doing for the last 100,000 years at least. I also know that, as individuals, we are all going to die.
Three principles are key.
Sound money and banking - no accepting of credit bubbles and bailouts.
Even if one thinks that credit bubble finance is not fraud it does not matter if governments (and central banks) do not bail it out. For if there are no bailouts then banks and other financial services enterprise that go in for this sort of stuff will eventually all go bankrupt - and new enterprises, based on sound principles, will replace them.
So the first principle is "no corporate welfare" (no Federal Reserve system and no Bank of England etc) - you might be surprised that there are even a few honest leftists who agree with that.
And there are more "Austrian School" economists in the United States than there have been for many decades - still a small minority, but the good guys are growing in number.
The second principle (these principles are NOT in order of importance) is rejection of government education and government examinations.
A person is a plumber if he engages in this type of work - and if his customers find he does good work. Not because he has a bit of paper from the government.
Ditto a journalist - if the only journalists are those taught in "schools of journalism" then freedom of the press is dead. A journalist is someone who gets paid to write (or broadcast) about the news - not just someone with a bit of paper from the government or a guild.
The growth of home schooling and real private schools (i.e. schools that reject "qualified" teachers and government tests) is a good sign.
For let us not forget what John Locke said about the idea of government education - it would destroy ideas of freedom "in the bud".
The indoctrination in collectivist ideas in government schools (and government influenced "private" schools) is no accident. H. Mann "the father of American public education" wanted this to happen (at least this is my interpretation of his vague and high flown writings) - and the later Bellamy brothers ( Francis and Edward - also from Mass) were fanatical socialists.
The question is not "why are government schools getting young children to sing the praises of Comrade Barack" the real question is "why did it take the collectivists so long to take control".
Government schools are unreformable - as the wicked things they are doing are exactly the sort of thing that those who set up the system hoped they would do.
The same goes for "elite" private schools they play ball with the collectivists.
Almost needless to say the "private" universties that accept government money are no different - they are collectivist to the core.
The good thing is that more people than ever now understand that - and, because they are so expensive, ordinary people ("Rednecks") are very unlikely to go to such places - no matter how high their I.Q.s are. So they are becomming more and more resistant to their tax money going to places their children will never see the insides of (other that to work as security guards or to clean the toilets and so on).
And the third principle?
That which all freedom is based.
The right to keep and bear arms - modern technology may make effective resistance to tyranny difficult. But there is still a lot ordinary people can do.
As the local newspaper in Scranton Pennsyvannia unintentionally reminded people. What it printed was a lie, as no one called out what it claimed was called out at the Governor Palin rally, but the smear did get a lot of people thinking.
The law of unintended consequences.
@Johnathan Pearce
Maybe they will not just bear it, but do something about it.
This is supported by the "Changing Images of Man" report from the Stanford Research Institute (SRI).
Refer: http://www.skilluminati.com/research/entry/scientists_on_acid_the_story_behind_changing_images_of_man/
If we postulate that the only real evolution in mankind's recent history has been happening in society, then we can reasonably suppose that society evolves because of what is in the heads of the people in those societies - the people who "do" or who shape things that ultimately affect the shape of their society and those related to it. This would be axiomatic.
If what is in the heads of those people is not evolving, or (say) if the forces within a society prevent changes being effected by those people, then the society will maintain the status quo - will continue to do things the same way as they have always done, and nothing changes. This is social stagnation. This would also seem to be axiomatic, but you can read an in-depth explanation/discussion of this in the SRI report.
To give some optimism for the future: Fortunately, so the SRI report theorizes, such stagnation does not (cannot) last forever, and societies tend to improve and move forwards in the long term, rather than slip back - though that does not stop some societies' rulers trying to hold things in an intolerable state (e.g., Nazi Germany, Communist Russia, Persia). This may be true of, for example, Germany or Russia, but we can see that the Persians seem to have had arguably some success in maintaining things much like they were in AD650.
For those who wish the status quo to prevail and yet also say that things can somehow evolve during social stagnation, then I would suggest that a sign of madness is said to be the repetition of behaviours/processes with the expectation that the outcome will be different to what it was last time. It is axiomatic that no change begets no change.