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jay's avatar

I was in a Sunday school class once where the teacher the teacherer gave a list of social problems and asked if class members could think of examples of each. They ranged from "growing acceptance of pornography" to "quality of goods and services declines". Class members were easily able to give examples. At the end of his list he revealed the punch line: He hadn't made up the list by looking at the news. The list came from a documentary about the causes of the fall of Rome made in the 1960s.

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jay's avatar

I wonder if in the final days of the Roman Empire, if the average Roman thought, "Oh no, the empire is dying! What can we do?" Or if they thought more like, "Sure, we have some problems. Every society has problems. They're no big deal. And hey, did you see the chariot race in the Circus Maximus yesterday?" Did they say, "Sure, we abandoned a few thousand people when we pulled the troops out of Britannia. They should have seen it coming and left long ago. And yeah, the government has given up even trying to stop barbarians from crossing the border into Lower Moesia. But hey, we can use the cheap labor. Okay, the emperor molests little boys. What he does in the privacy of his own palace is no one else's business." Etc. What's really scary is, those issues I just mentioned were all real issues in ancient Rome.

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