The Long Slide Part One

I think it may be time to face a harsh reality. The world as we know it is going to shit. I know! It's a shock!
To be honest, the world has been constantly going to shit since people grasped what going to shit meant. Ask anyone of any age or region and they'll all say the same. The Aztecs thought the world was going to shit. The Egyptians thought the world was going to shit. The Romans thought the world was going to shit. The colony at Roanoke thought...well, in that case they were definitely right. But you get my drift.
I've always maintained that the United States is Rome in Fast Forward. What took the Romans 700 years to lose won't take us a fraction that long. To be honest, we haven't even really mattered as a country except for the past hundred years or so. Before that we were a backwater filled with savages. Europe was where it was at. If you were in the US you were akin to an aborigine. Maybe taller.
But then World War I came and we tore that shit up! Well, no, not really. we were Johnny Come Latelies to the party and were treated mostly with disdain. Then the League of Nations came along and was not, in retrospect, that good of an idea. But, BLAMMO! WWII, baby!
We drop the bomb, help off the Nazis and all of a sudden we're the bees knees. Every country wants to be us. Or blow us up. We're the new tough on the prison block. One minute we're following George Washington's policy of isolationism and the next we're GLOBAL, man!
But the fundamental problems that took Rome years to realize they'd created we built in no time. All of a sudden there was the super rich and everyone else. The super rich didn't want to pay taxes and everyone else couldn't. We threw money at the military like dollar bills at a strip joint, just like the Romans did. In the words of Septimius Severus we "Enriched the soldiers". Except...we really didn't.
We enriched those already enriched. The wealthy company owners who built the war machines (some of which worked, some which didn't and some which just sucked money and never actually came out at all) While these people got richer and richer soldiers themselves found their families back home on welfare.
We lowered the taxes on the rich and raised taxes on everyone else to make up for the shortfall. We became a nation of debtors led by corrupt public officials and a shadowy "electoral college" that no one seemed to know very well. We invaded nations and then sent them transport planes filled with millions of dollars all the while we borrowed and borrowed and mortgaged our future.
And, just like the Romans found out 2000 years before us. Our economy is in the depths of a collapse. Yes, I know, it collapses every fifteen years or so. But this time it's not just us. In a modern age it's a global shitstorm.
Rioting in England, Fascist Tea Partiers fondling suggestive photos of Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachman and calling for a good old fashioned lynchin' just like their ignorant KKK breathren of yore, most of Europe going into debt. Pretty much the whole middle east revolting against something or someone. Things ain't lookin' so nice. So what are we to do?