Intolerable Times: An August 2021 Prediction of What Would Happen When Enough Is Enough

Stephen J. Douglass on Jan 10 18:22:30

View QTML

The following commentary post was sent to us at Green and Free by an old friend with a near Talebian ascerbic wit, but, whom I had always considered to be politically mainstream. Received back in August of 2020, it turned out to be spot-on prophetic. I expect to see fairly regular posts from this author who self-identifies as Tacitus.

Intolerable Times

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

Those words, written in an intolerable time, addressed to the King of England and to all humanity, announced the intent of our founders to establish the first (and still the only) nation in human history that recognizes and enshrines into its highest law the notion that every single human being possesses rights which are God-given and inviolable and the protection of which are in fact the basis for establishing a government.

Among those rights not to be violated, whether by a single tyrant or the tyranny of the mob, are the freedoms to say what we want, to assemble, to petition our government, to exercise our religion or no religion at all, and the right to a free press.

Like all things man-made, our country has always been imperfect. Imperfect at our founding, imperfect today, and imperfect at all points in between. No imperfection has had a more painful legacy than our continuation of the evil institution of slavery through our founding. Whatever the practical reasons behind that compromise, it set us on the path to the Civil War.

Less than 75 years later, we found ourselves once more in an intolerable time. Not because slavery was unique to the United States. Even now, more than 150 years later, slavery continues in other parts of the world.

What made slavery so intolerable in the United States was that it was, and is, incompatible with the very reason for our existence, the belief that all people are created equal and have the unalienable right to “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

Our house, divided, could not stand. For our survival, slavery had to go.

So, we fought our bloodiest war. Not our bloodiest war relative to our population. Our bloodiest war. Period. Out of a population of 31 million, we lost 620 thousand, the equivalent of losing 6.6 million today. Families were torn apart. Brother fought, and killed, brother.

When confronted with the choice between freedom and slavery, we chose freedom for all and paid a steep and bloody price. A price that was worth paying.

Our imperfections did not begin and end with slavery, that simply has been the most glaring.

But, regardless of our imperfections, and in part because of our responses to them – responses that did not hide or define away these imperfections but that addressed them and led to change, often painful change – throughout our history, we have remained humanity’s greatest hope, a beacon for the rest of the world.

Now, we find ourselves entering another intolerable time. We are at a crossroads, and if we do not address a growing threat, we will soon be called to make another payment in blood.

For more than a century, enemies among us, exercising the freedoms protected under our system of government, have been working relentlessly to destroy our system of government and take those freedoms from the rest of us. Like any cancer, the threat posed by these enemies started out insignificant but, aided both by our external enemies and our indifference, has metastasized and spread throughout our society.

Taking advantage of our indifference, these enemies have moved largely unopposed from one victory to the next: we did not oppose them when they took over the humanities departments of our universities; we did not oppose them when they took over the media; we did not oppose them when they took over the seminaries and churches; we did not oppose them when they took over the education of our young; we did not oppose them when they took over the major cities; we did not oppose them when they took over the federal bureaucracy or the boardrooms of our major corporations; and we have not opposed as they have been taking over social media.

Through the years, they have been opportunistic, leaping from, and coopting, cause after cause, from workers’ rights to antiwar movements to antifascism to civil rights to anti-nuclear proliferation to the environment to feminism to multiculturalism to global warming to universal health care to climate change to sexuality and gender equity and back to anti-fascism, picking up, using, and as needed discarding allies and useful idiots along the way. And regardless of the nominal cause du jour, always working toward the same end: the destruction of our system of government and way of life.

Make no mistake, they don’t care about workers, peace, civil rights, war, nuclear proliferation, the environment, women, multiculturalism, minorities, climate, health care, or gender and sexuality. They only care about achieving power. The power to destroy our system and replace it with their tyranny.

We already see the evidence of how they intend to exercise their power.

On social media, they censor opposing viewpoints, including those of our President, ban opponents, manipulate algorithms to skew search results heavily in their favor, doxx opponents, destroy livelihoods, bury unfavorable stories, call people to violence, and promote and perpetuate falsehoods.

On television, you see them marching masked and dressed in black through our cities burning down black neighborhoods, beating and curb-stomping opponents – sometimes killing them – including women, looting and torching businesses, killing police, shooting indiscriminately, and stopping traffic and pulling drivers from cars and beating them.

On television, you also see them looking presentable, dressed in suits, sitting in studios justifying the unjustifiable, cheering on the destruction, telling you it isn’t what you clearly see it is while also telling you that the rest of us (meaning you) deserve it, lying to you about the identities and aims of the perpetrators, and blaming the violence on those opposing it.

Behind church pulpits and university lecterns, you hear the same things. Of course, in the former you no longer hear anything about God or salvation and in the latter you no longer hear anything about thinking for yourself.

You also hear the same things from all blue, and far too many red, politicians who won’t let you gather for religious services but praise marauding mobs destroying your cities and your places of employment, and who overhype a flu to put 40,000,000 people out of work in order to do political damage to the President they already conspired to overthrow on the basis of an absolute lie, and who in the process kill many tens of thousands of old people in nursing homes with impunity.

Do you really believe that the sort of people who engage in such behavior would think twice before shoving anyone they consider unworthy into concentration camps? Or ovens?

While the answers to both those questions are obvious, there is another question whose answer is not so obvious: Knowing all of this, what are we going to do about it?

As in the days preceding the Declaration of Independence and those preceding the Civil War, things as they are in this intolerable time cannot endure. One or the other must – and will – go.

Our way of life. Or them.

— An American

#1

Carl Milsted, Jr on Feb 23, 2023 11:42 AM
View QTML

This is a test comment.

Replies:

You need to be logged in to comment