I recently picked my nephew up from a suburban train station just outside Philly at 5:55 P.M. one evening.  Reassuringly, at five minutes to six, I saw a train coming toward the station but then shooting past it.  So I assumed that this train was an express, and the local train would be soon behind it.  But then I noticed that the train I saw shoot past was actually stopped about a hundred yards past the station.  Then it started slowly, seemingly reluctantly, backing up into the station.  When my nephew got off, I asked him what the conductor had said about why it overshot.  He was told that "leaves on the track" were causing trains to be unable to brake properly.  I noted this explanation for future reference to myself to not cross any tracks in the months of October and November, while also pondering the absolute imbecility of the statement. 

In the socialist theater-of-the-absurd that has overtaken our major cities in America, there could be only two reasonable explanations for said train missing its station by a hundred yards: 1) the engineer is high/on a cell phone/completely inept or 2) the brakes don't work.  As one who often drives over train tracks, I must say I like explanation #1 much better, because #2 implies we are in an even worse mess.  Failure to maintain equipment in a high-tech society is the bell tolling in the distance that push is coming to shove for us as a nation.

A few days later, I happened to be driving through Philly and hit a pothole that stretched across the entire road, and qualified as a true tire belt-killer, or at least a supporter of the wheel realignment industry.  I was angry at myself because I had hit the exact same pothole two weeks earlier.  Potholes – like trains missing stations – may seem trivial, but consider that it's only a few years since an Amtrak train in Philly missed a curve and killed a good many people.  There are no figures on how many traffic accidents and fatalities are caused by motorists avoiding potholes in last-second decisions.

To socialists out there, including the soccer-mom socialists of the suburbs, I'd just issue a warning: get used to this.  Expect – no, depend on – the following in the next 30 years: increasing numbers of train and plane accidents; increasing numbers of serious "mystery illnesses"; increasing numbers of illnesses from improper food processing and handling; an increased number of cases of unsanitary or toxic drinking water; increased technical "glitches" that shut down your ATMs, your credit card use, your internet, your cable TV, your phone.  Two things are coursing through our society that guarantee these things, and at ever increasing frequency: 1) our socialist educational system (and our family structure) is turning out graduates who simply can't do the job, whatever it is, and 2) our socialist governance is too busy with diversity issues, equality issues, and otherwise controlling your life to deal with the nuts and bolts, the nitty-gritty of making cities and nations actually function.

There are three fundamental types of people in the world: 1) those who live to make things, fix things, create things, repair things, improve things; 2) those who simply can't or won't do any of the preceding; and 3) those who like to control groups 1 and 2.  We are running short of the first group.  We have a bumper crop of the second and third.  As a society, we are in trouble.  Civilizations decline when the first group falls below a certain threshold.  One gets the feeling that we are near that cutoff. 

To paraphrase our late president, "If you like your socialist candidate, you can keep your socialist candidate."  I would end with this warning to all the suburbanites and Millennials out there: if you like things in your life to function, if you like to eat at your local salad bar and not visit an E.R. later that evening, if you like trusting that the landing gear on your flight to Disneyworld will really lock in place when lowered, and if you like to ride Amtrak and not end your ride with your car on its side, then think very, very seriously about not electing that socialist – from the school board to the White House.