I realize that it is probably a good idea to start off by explaining to the uninitiated, who might be confused by the title, that a levee is an embankment built on the shore of a river to protect the surrounding land from flooding when, as so often happens, the water level rises and threatens nearby homes, businesses, and farms with inevitable inundation. It is classic human preparation for the unexpected rainy day (or season) that can lead to catastrophe, and humanity has been building levees since we stopped being hunter-gatherers and discovered that the most fertile land is often adjacent to a river, which also provides a handy source of water when drought hits and threatens the harvest. Planning for the worst is, in short, a wise survival mechanism—just as inviting disaster by failing to prepare is incredibly foolhardy.

Looking around at the world today, one has to wonder whether the levee of peace and prosperity that has tenuously glued our planet together since the end of World War Two in 1945 is about to break and flood our world with tragedy and keening want—a situation that we have invited through our own short-sighted stupidity.

The collapsing and obscenely expensive welfare state in France is in flames, although at least one formerly respected mainstream news organization recently decided to describe the widespread and ruinous riots as mere “scuffles” in a laughably inaccurate and biased report. Both the United Kingdom and Germany are engulfed in self-created crises involving illegal immigration and economy-killing Green energy policies. Weaponry is raining down throughout Russia, Ukraine, and the entire Mideast, and global shortages of critically-important diesel fuel are popping up because we vacillated between ignoring and facilitating the zealots in Iran for nearly half of a century. Rising interest rates are squeezing nations north and south that are already burdened with onerous debt caused by blithely ignoring the laws of addition and subtraction, so the possibility of sovereign defaults, which entail a country defaulting on its payments to creditors, is becoming a real threat born of electing idiots who have no idea how to manage a national budget.

It could, of course, be argued that the turmoil throughout the world today is no worse than it has been in the past. For example, during the annus horribilis of 1968, France was also engulfed in riots, the so-called Prague Spring of democracy in Czechoslovakia was cut short by a brutal Soviet invasion and occupation, and Americans dealt with the souring of the war in Vietnam after the Tet Offensive as well as the shocking assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy. The catastrophic street battles at the Chicago Democratic Convention that same year seemed to signal the start of an ugly new era in U.S. politics, and American college campuses began their long march to the political and cultural Left; unsurprisingly, we now find avowed Marxists holding power in many of our cities, and national leaders of the Democrat Party openly advocate for discarding our 250 year-old Constitutional Republic in favor of governmental structures oddly akin to the Communist dictatorships that have been crushing civil liberties, economic well being, and free speech around the world for over 100 years.

It is true that America and the countries around us have had many problems in the past. The reason for this depressingly repetitive cycle is humans always seem to prefer leaders who paper over obvious problems with oblivious policies. However, the stark differences between the upheavals of a year like 1968 and what America is facing today are three-fold.

First, we are now in debt right up to our eyeballs, which both restricts our options going forward and frays our already tattered social safety net. In addition, nearly sixty years of creating and celebrating a vast industry of victimization in both government and academia has fragmented our nation (and many others around the world) to the point where political and cultural consensus on almost any issue seems a functionally impossible dream. Finally, the sheer fragility of our many frighteningly interdependent systems of transportation, manufacturing, banking, energy production, and healthcare, which allow our lives to proceed with some minimal degree of comfort, means that a shock, war, or disaster on the other side of the globe can easily wash up on our shores. We are learning the hard way that financial bubbles, famines, insane immigration policies, and a host of other problems travel fast in terms of balance sheet blowback, waves of refugees, and government-sponsored civic dysfunction. Moreover, as we all learned during the horrid Covid-19 years, fear and panic can lead to grotesquely damaging and expensive political decisions that can harm us for many decades.

Yet, it is worth remembering that, despite all the ways we are frittering away both our security and prosperity, all of the problems we are suffering could be much, much worse. I would not trade our troubled today for our shared global past of gnawing hunger and appalling sanitation, open air slave markets, miserable housing, widespread ignorance, and bloody and merciless mass combat conducted with axes and broadswords.

Nonetheless, the potential for systemic breakdowns both here in America and abroad that could prompt a worldwide crash cannot be ignored, and the flames now engulfing France are not all that different from our own painful 2020 summer filled with arson, assaults, and looting, which were also encouraged by Leftist politicians who see destruction and discord as their path to electoral victory because there are—at least for those uninterested in the good of society as a whole—malevolent opportunities offered by generalized chaos and distrust.

Look to New York, Chicago, and Seattle for grim previews of the delusional dysfunction Americans will likely all be forced to suffer if we do not insist our leaders start planning for a future where public safety, economic strength, and national security are our priorities. As the song goes, “If it keeps on rainin’, levee’s goin’ to break / When the levee breaks, I’ll have no place to stay.” Continuing to wallow in crazed Communist fantasies rather than patriotically preparing means that we’re all going to drown while our Leftist “leaders” chastise us for our misery—and ingratitude.

So remember to smile while your nation is being slowly destroyed.