Step By Step Over the Edge

One of the many peculiarities of human nature is that human beings are adaptable - we can become accustomed to just about anything that we imagine we have to do in order to survive.

To name but one widely-known extreme example, there were a great many solid, moral middle- (and even upper-) class wives and daughters in Europe in the 1940s.  Amid the collapse of the Nazi empire and resulting starvation, throngs of them prostituted themselves for a loaf of bread or a chocolate bar from a Yankee or Russian solider.

A few years on and the rebuilding was under way.  The stunning thing is how many of these women returned to something resembling their normal lives, one step at a time as opportunity presented itself, locking away the horrific memories in a box.

As stick-thin street prostitutes in 1946, if they dared to think back a few years, the 1940 version of themselves could never imagine that they'd fall so far.

And a few years in the future, looking at the 1950 version, you'd never imagine what they were doing four years earlier.

So, on a truly necessary note of optimism... despite appearances, we who are living in 2020 have much to be thankful for.  There is a long, long way further to fall, and it is not written in the stars that we will.

Fair enough... but will 2021 be any better?

And yet...

Six months ago, would anyone have imagined that, within the lifetime of a field mouse, U.S. government force would be applied to shut down churches and prevent people from working?

That parents would be arrested for taking their children to the playground, or surfers for catching a wave?

One month ago, would anyone have expected police to simply leave their headquarters, allowing it to be occupied and torched by violent rabble, egged on by local politicians?

That, as cities burned and looters rampaged, the state government would be threatening lawsuits to try to prevent the U.S. Army being used to restore order?

Of course, there's nothing the least bit surprising about police killing an unarmed man, and every time it happens it's horrific and indefensible.  We live in a deeply imperfect world, though, and no matter how hard we try, bad things will occasionally still happen.

Thankfully, the number of times per year this particular evil happens has been going down.  But the MSM is fond of writing up any such incident, at least when it occurs to a black man, and blaming it on Orange Man Bad.  We're guaranteed to hear so much about any such incident that it almost seems normal.

So the news about the death of George Floyd wasn't the least bit surprising, despite media efforts to make it seem so.  What would be surprising, if anyone knew about it, is that last year, in a nation containing a third of a billion people, in the entire country the number of unarmed black men killed by police was in the single digits.  Unfortunately, the fact that you didn't know that is equally unsurprising.

The autopsy report showed that George Floyd was infected with the Chinese coronavirus at the time of his death.  Under normal circumstances, he'd be chalked up as a victim of the virus - who knows, maybe he was anyway?  The media love virus deaths to blame on the current administration and on selfish people who refuse to observe the lockdown rules unless they're protesting.

Black man killed by white cop is a much better story, however, so we doubt that he'll make it into the covid column unless someone wants a two-fer.  We also can't help but notice that, where peaceful American protesting the unconstitutional tyranny locking them in their homes were excoriated and arrested as would-be Typhoid Marys, the throngs of non-social-distanced looters and pyromaniacs are subjected to no such abuse.

What's left in what seems like the accelerating collapse of the greatest nation in all of history?  The year's not even half over, so there's plenty more time.

Peering Timidly Round the Corner

Well, we haven't had any assassinations, and if you think about it for a moment, it's hard not to wonder why.  Consider New York City's odious Mayor Bill de Blasio, whose own daughter was arrested in a riot, to his praise.  Thousands eventually surrounded the mayoral palace, demanding his resignation.

Of course, his mansion was guarded by none other than the NYPD, who've been defunded, derided, and demeaned by Hizzoner.  It's a measure of their professionalism and sense of duty that they didn't just quietly melt away into the crowd, leaving de Blasio to fend for himself in front of the angry mob.

There have been a fair number of incompetent attempted assassinations of Republicans, to general applause from the media, but nobody's actually succeeded in bumping one off - yet.  The fact that most Republican politicos rarely dare to venture into Democrat strongholds is unhealthy for the country, the party, and the future, but as we see on the news, potentially a life-preserving act for them.

As if tempers aren't running high enough, we are mere months from an election that, we have every confidence, will be as riven with fraud as any we've seen in a century.  Despite Twitter's best efforts to bury the truth, mail-in ballots are a ripe opportunity for fraud as has been proved time and again.

Tens of millions of mailed ballots have gone missing over the past few elections; American elections have been flatly overturned by such fraud; and even MIT’s Election Lab admits that fraud is "more frequent" with mailed ballots than with traditional in-person voting - particularly in-person voting with paper ballots which can be physically counted when necessary and are under strict control from the time they're printed until they're used.

It's easy to imagine a situation in which the election is close and the result hangs on jurisdictions where fraud can be easily proved, but the fraud is only reported by right-leaning media.  It doesn't bear thinking about what the result might be when Republicans cry "We wuz robbed!" while Democrats attempt to occupy their ill-gotten seats, especially considering Joe Biden's suggestions to continue the suicidal coronavirus shutdown indefinitely on behalf of the climate while paying to bail out arsonists and looters as fast as the police can arrest them.

Culture Clash, Or Culture War?

It's a common cliche to speak of the "culture war."  We object to that phrase because we believe that the word "war" should be reserved for a real shooting conflict, instead of being abused for law-enforcement actions such as the "war on drugs" or for social programs such as the "war on poverty."

In spite of our reservations, we're coming more and more to the realization that "culture war" is drifting closer to the real definition of literal force of arms including death by a rapid form of lead poisoning - people both black and white are being shot and bludgeoned to death during the George Floyd riots, which our media persist in calling "justified protest."

We've shown how it's becoming utterly impossible to reconcile lefty views of Twitter with ours.  We've seen animosity between racial groups being deliberately stirred up by politicians who profit from setting groups against each other.  "Candid Conversations about Race" explains why we can't have candid conversations about race without being trashed by a Twitter mob.

Yes, race in America today is a huge and growing problem, mostly because Democrats work all day every day - these days, all night too - stirring up resentment and bitterness in both directions, even while normal people mostly don't care what color their neighbor might be.  Democrats don't want our race problem - or any problem, really - to be solved because that's how they get votes.  Indeed, they shut down all genuine discussion of actual solutions precisely to make sure that we can't solve it, because solving the problem would cost them victims' votes and money.

There's an old saying, "You may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you."  American tradition has long held to a "live and let live" policy of letting people do their own thing as much as possible.  Our modern left hates, despises, is triggered by, and uses violence against anyone who believes or does anything other than exactly what they say at this exact moment - regardless of what they might have said to the contrary yesterday.

It is impossible for anyone not a deranged psychopath to live in such a society, if the word "society" even applies.  As we see today to our disgust, far too many Americans, like the newly-whored German women, simply defer to the circumstances and degrade themselves to survive.

Not all Americans are willing to do this.  Not all cops are willing to literally kneel down before rampaging criminals to protect themselves.  Not all soldiers or police will abandon their stalwart defense of the innocent, even when their masters order them to abandon a police station to the mob.

Not all of America is riven by domestic insurrection - indeed, a map of the violent disturbances would bear a striking resemblance to the famous maps of counties voting for Hillary or Trump.  But we now have serious people in power making solid plans to defund and even disband the police who, most of the time, work to protect most of us.  If such idiotic policies are allowed to take hold in the cities where most of the rioters live, it won't be long before thugs and looters run out of stuff to loot and cast their eyes further out.

As the article from The Federalist which we linked above put it:

The next logical question is this: Can a democratic-republic function when its media is so dishonest, its elite so corrupt, and when one of its major political parties allows street violence? The answer is probably not. God help us.

If you have enough people on both sides calling for war - or demanding absolute surrender and submission of the other side, which amounts to the same thing - eventually you'll get a real, full-on war.

The left knows that war is coming - that's what they want, after all - and they also know which side has all the guns.  That's why they keep trying to confiscate privately-owned arms instead of letting people keep and bear them as required by the Constitution.

The more guns are in the hands of ordinary people, the less likely it is that an actual war will take place. In spite of Google trying to hide "armed citizen stories," we see over and over that leftists are natural cowards and thieves who don't care to put their own lives at risk by going up against an armed, prepared opponent.  So the one bright spot in all of this is that, yet again, gun sales are breaking records.

Have you gotten yours yet?  Guns are like parachutes - by the time you need it to defend your life and that of your family, it will be too late to get one, and the police - if  they even still exist - will be miles away and otherwise occupied defending their own families.