Defiance Or Gloom?

     Your Curmudgeon isn’t sure what he’s hearing.

     Some voices are elevated in anger, furious about events in Afghanistan and seemingly resolved to expel the villains and incompetents in Washington who are responsible for the debacle. Many of these are persons who’ve expressed similar intentions for some time. But other voices speak in the dreary cadences and tones of resignation, as if to say “Now that our decline from greatness is undeniable, let’s all sit back and enjoy it.” And among those are some who once expressed the same resolve as those in the former camp.

     Where does America stand?

     It was hard to tell after the fall of South Vietnam, too. At the top, we went from an inept caretaker elevated by the fall of his predecessor to a clueless peanut grower more concerned about getting people to like him than about mastering the job to which he’d been elected. Congress, needless to say, was no better; read William E. Simon’s books A Time for Truth and A Time for Action for the details. The ascension of Ronald Reagan appeared to reverse the trend toward decline, but the events that followed make that reversal seem more illusory than actual.

     So where do we stand? What does the future hold for the Land of the Formerly Free?

     We can no longer trust electoral processes. The nation is still half-paralyzed by fear over a disease only slightly worse than a bad cold. The Usurpers have strangled our energy production, emasculated our military, and are busily destroying our currency. Our “allies” around the world – they’re actually our client states, but that’s a story for another time – are in terror that what’s just happened to Afghanistan could soon be visited upon them. And dozens of outright political prisoners are being kept in solitary confinement in some Washington sub-basement, for the heinous crime of taking selfies in the Capitol building after having been invited in by the door wardens.

     The Founding Fathers would most certainly have been shooting by now. Indeed, the bodies of Usurpers and quislings would be stacked like cordwood. Yet Americans appear to be waiting for someone else to solve the problem. (Israel, perhaps?)

     That’s a rather plain indicator. It indicates that the problem is We the People.

     Hearken to a cri de coeur more than twenty years old:

     Over the past century, liberty has been flensed away from Americans, slice after thin slice. That’s the way to subordinate a free people. Get them used to bending the knee and tugging the forelock in little things first, things that don’t appear to be relevant to them personally. Get them thinking that only antisocial curmudgeons would raise a fuss over matters as trivial as zoning restrictions, or licensing requirements for hairdressers. Better yet, get them thinking that anyone who would resist these “obviously desirable” new requirements of the law must want to do them harm.

     With each slice of lost liberty has gone a little of the defiance that animates a free people. We’re closing in on the point of no return, the threshold that, once crossed, will become an impenetrable wall that forbids us a backward step.

     In parallel with the loss of personal defiance has gone a slackening of the national will toward foreign enemies. The recent contretemps with the Chinese is an important harbinger of things to come. Few have dared to suggest that, when America puts young men and women into uniforms and weapons into their hands, it’s preparing them to risk their lives for some purpose beyond a trade agreement. Few have dared to suggest that a country whose government dares to take Americans hostage, to stake their lives and freedom as counters in a game, has committed an act of war, an act to which a country with dignity could respond in only one way.

     We have become comfortable with subordination at home and humiliation abroad.

     The red and white stripes wobble and weave. The starry blue field softens and begins to run. The borders dissolve, the colors blend, and soon there is only a uniform dull brown. The color of mud. The color of failure, The color of the loss of hope. And the hand that holds liberty’s banner aloft slackens, and fails, and becomes cold.

     Is there another way to view things?

     Your Curmudgeon feels a fog enclosing us. He senses a deepening of national malaise, a slow but steady descent toward irrevocable resignation. The imperatives of personal and familial survival take up all our time and energy. No one seems to have the will to fight. Perhaps we’ve decided that there’s no point to fighting, that subordination and humiliation are our inevitable lot.

     Your Curmudgeon reports; you decide.

7 comments

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  1. Whatever you do, don’t permit gloom to become despair. A reckoning approaches. Can’t be any other way.

    • Butch DuCote on August 18, 2021 at 8:04 AM

    You ask if there is another way to view things. My perspective on our current affairs is tainted by 26.5 years of enforcing foreign policy as a Marine. Fifty-six years ago this week with a seventy pound pack, I descended a wet net on an LST into a Higgins boat, fixed bayonet, and rode ashore to a place called Vietnam. Little did I know at the time events there would change my life forever. A country bumpkin with little experience beyond the small Cajun town where I grew up, this place was overwhelming. I did not understand the world then but I came to the belief before my tour of duty was up that we were not their for the benefit of the local inhabitants.

    On an August day thirty-nine years later I would find myself leaving the deserts of Africa as part of Operation Enduring Freedom. The difference this time, I knew a lot more of how the world works. I had read General Butler’s “War is a Racket” and was well schooled in the history of warfare and why we fight.

    How does this relate to events of the day and where we find ourselves as a nation? Having served in a few hell holes I’ve come to realize that freedom is a state of mind. I have observed many cultures and they way they govern. In the history of mankind we have always been ruled by a political cast. Our freedoms have always been an allusion. If they were not we would revolt. We have never owned our bodies. I am not saying that we do not get to make choices. We do, but, the choices we make are of no consequence to our country. If they are then we become political prisoners like the folks of January 6. The only people that are free in this country are the ones who go along with the government dictates.

    With all that said, there are those of us who will not be dictated to. We have a line in the sand and will unleash the dogs of hell if that line is crossed. We are like most of the folks I’ve encountered during my foreign travels; we just want to be left alone. I guess that marks me as a domestic terrorist.

    • Mike Austin on August 18, 2021 at 9:08 AM

    Getting a bit pessimistic, are we? Understandable, naturally. But consider:

    1. The Boston Massacre was in 1770. The Revolution did not break out.

    2. The Intolerable Acts were in 1774. The Revolution did not break out.

    3. Thomas Gage, at Lexington and Concord in 1775, attempted to seize the firearms and powder of the Patriots. Boom. Heard ’round the world.

    When this so-called “government” makes a real move to take our guns…well, that will indicate spicy times ahead. That it has not made such a move yet is because of fear. It should fear.

    As for all those government types boasting that gun-owning Americans could never defeat any military force sent by Washington DC to enforce “gun control”, I do believe that the Taliban just showed otherwise.

    • Michael Stone on August 18, 2021 at 9:20 AM

    What if this is the problem?

    What I mean is, what if the blogs allow us to connect and thus become a pressure release valve?

    What if it’s this connection in cyberspace that prevents us from attempting to connect in meat-space?

    What if complaining about it for going on 25 years online is the problem?

    I’m not blaming you. I’m blaming me.

    1. I have often considered that the blogs have served as lightning rods, allowing us to blow off steam and then take a breather rather than build up the steam needed to actuate. Talk is far easier. This makes it seem that patriots are not what they once were. Thing is, the usurper is the latest vestiges of the bien pensants who first schemed the Prog Project and are even more cowardly.

      In my first comment this was a consideration. Forces beyond us all will determine the ultimate outcome. I.e., things must right themselves despite all the talk and participants. Natural Law must prevail.

    • Michael Stone on August 18, 2021 at 10:37 AM

    I can go a step further:

    I just quit my job working for the County Attorney.

    Last year, the incumbent retired and the new lady ran unopposed.

    Which means she could have won with one vote.

    As soon as she started, everyone started leaving because the new regime came with a distinctly Bolshevik air.

    With the internet, my vision went from local to federal, from my neighbors to global.

    What if I accidentally became a globalist without even realizing?

  2. I posted about this at my place today… I think the American Empire is dying, much as the Soviet one did 30 years ago.

    Totalitarian ideologies like Islam, Chinese “Communism” (really more akin to Nazism), and American “Social Justice” Marxism are fighting it out across the world. The notion that people should be free is everywhere on the retreat.

    Choose your oppressor. The violent Jihadist demanding obedience to a twisted vision of a violent God forever trapped in a 7th century illiterate form, the ChiCom Social Credit system, the mass technocratic surveillance state micromanaging every facet of life, or the Not-Religion of Social Justice, replacing Original Sin with Unforgivable Bigotry – an endless quest for greater self-loathing.

    Which tyrannical, hateful ideology will prevail? Or will they all balance out to some degree in their own respective spheres?

    I don’t know. But the America I thought I knew died a long time ago. Perhaps before I was even born. And it’s Imperial successor is on its last legs now, too.

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