RC-The mercenary army protecting rome vs the mercenary economy supplying the United States

I am really tired.  I'm not sure what the deal is.
Maybe it is the heat
Maybe it is the swimming, the steady build up of exhaustion
or perhaps just old age, the steady build up of death
or Juggling too many flaming projects
trying to turn all the tumblers
before they turn to ash or set me on fire
perhaps it is all of these things
the ashes of my life, the flames extinguished
I was up at 2:00 in the morning.
If only I could tell you why
it would make you cringe and laugh
we share our worlds with so many small things
So I didn't sleep but I managed to make a passable day of it,
I dealt with the seeming endless problem with wasps
And the problem with heat and the fierce sun
and I worked and spent as much time as possible writing
but today would have been a swimming day under other circumstances.
I could have gone, I wasn't willing to go.
Even those of us facing the inevitable decline if we give just a moments hesitation
hesitate and decline
Or perhaps it is my sense of the inevitable doom
which I am apparently too smart to miss and too dumb to be heard
something even you could not make me forget forever
how I envy the immortal.

In the decline and fall of the roman empire this idea of a country losing its spark through a long peaceful prosperity is raised and ties in directly with the failure of reserve currencies which has been discussed.
In that book the idea presented is that the minds of men were gradually reduced to the same level, the fire of genius was extinguished, and even the military spirit evaporated and while personal valor remained the country no longer possessed that public courage which is nourished by "the love of independence, the sense of national honor, the presence of danger and the habit of command."  If true, perhaps we owe more to the terrorists than we have to fear from them.  For in trying to harm us, and harming us in fact, they build both our sense of national honor and present a clear and present danger that might be absent otherwise.
However, we still have the problem of exporting our technology and wealth.
The discussion in the decline and fall continues.  The outsourcing there was the military.  The country no longer willing to defend itself, hired its armies who would have no national honor, at least none to rome.  And we here in the US, by my reckoning have outsourced our manufacturing, we have lost the public courage to provide for ourselves, our Radio Shacks having no creative...creators, goes bankrupt, the society that should support it throwing away everything rather than repairing it if it requires the least bit of technology, each abandoned cell phone, computer, alarm clock and hand towel surrendering a little more of our freedom, weakening us a little further in the face of our enemies.   Today, we hold out our reserve currency, backed with nothing more than reputation; and when the reputation is gone, we will have nothing, but what we have squandered and when the creative come out of the next generation and look for a place to find the little electronic pieces they need to rebuild our empire, they will find closed and abandoned buildings with broken signs that once said radio shack.