We've Only Just Begun

We're actually involved in a kind of (so far) slow-moving Civil War. And I think the progression is pretty easy to see.

1) Leadership. It's a fairly simple and obvious fact that if you have enough money, you're not subject to the same "Justice" as the rest of us. Once people see "leaders" getting away with larceny, fraud, torture, bribery, child rape, and even murder, then why should the "common folk" hold themselves to any other standard of behavior?

2) Followership: Even when those standards are set and adhered to by people we admire, over time, we will misconstrue and eventually totally pervert the concept. Vince Lombardi says, "winning isn't everything; it's the only thing", and a very short time later, it's morphed into "win at all cost". And that perversion happened well after Lombardi publicly refuted his own statement, saying he regretted ever having said it. Didn't matter.

3) Political Marketing: Self-Governance = Self-Loathing. Anti-Gubmint sentiment strikes at the very heart of our little experiment in democracy.

We're the Government, and Government sucks, so: We Suck.

But our need for self preservation requires us to try not to internalize that hatred - we will most likely turn it outward, looking for some external agent to blame for our feelings of being victimized. So pick a group - any group. Muslims, Hispanics, Liberals, Tea Partiers, NRA Members, NeoCons...you name it, we got a group for you to hate with the power of a thousand suns.

So what we have now is the beginning of something I think is already in motion and will simply continue to snowball until it consumes us all. If that sounds as dire and overblown to you as it does to me, then we can still hope for cooler heads to prevail, but it's probably best if you don't now start thinking about what happens if we mix in a nice big hunk of the disruptions we can expect to be driven by Climate Change in the next 10 - 30 years.

So, here's what I think is a kind of instigating incident:

Any given Stand Your Ground law is being interpreted by an awful lot of average yahoos as a license to impose their will on anybody they don't like, and/or act out their Wyatt Earp fantasies, and/or exact vengeance for what they perceive as "those people" tearing down our once-great USA blah blah blah.



None of these boneheads oughta get medals for brains - but nobody ever deserves to get shot arguing about noise in the neighborhood. This just gets worse from here on out.