Archives
Tuesday, July 07, 2009
An InstaPunk Public
Service Utility
NOBODY CAN YELL CONTINUOUSLY. I've always been fascinated by the boiling frog phenomenon that seems to describe the reaction of otherwise normal people when they're caught in the midst of a time of cataclysmic political retrogression. While The Terror was rounding up counterrevolutionaries in France, while Stalin was rounding up counterrevolutionaries in Russia, while Hitler was rounding up Jews in the Reich.... Ordinary folks must have known at some level that the bonds of civilization were dissolving, but they still had to go to work everyday, and matters of shocking moment somehow became the stuff of petty gossip -- and dare I say 'punditry' -- rather than a shrieking call to action. When the unthinkable becomes routine, what becomes of the person whose whole soul is screaming in outrage? My guess is that the constant sight of what his neighbors and fellow countrymen simply will not see either gradually inures him to all varieties of disaster OR he becomes convinced that he himself has lost his mind.
That's how I've come to regard the Obama administration. The unthinkable is now routine. Every new day brings us a new outrage against the constitution, the separation of powers, national security, the free enterprise system, and the 200-plus years of individual liberty and personal responsibility that made this the greatest, freest, and most prosperous nation on earth. Even the people who are nominally on our side are sitting placidly in the simmering media pot on the stove, acting and talking as if major crimes against our heritage and values were mere political maneuvers to be parsed like chess gambits or poker hands.
Yes,
you're being slowly boiled to death.
It's not true that all this is politics as usual. The hard thing to remember. Our country is being hijacked and dismantled. If you know that in your heart of hearts, you have NOT lost your mind. Things CAN go way south in a hell of a hurry, irretrievably so. But no one can be hysterically overwrought all the time. It's too exhausting. What's important is that no matter how everyone else is coping, you retain some access to the underlying reality, so that when all around you are acting deaf, dumb, and blind to the unfolding ruination, you have somewhere to go.
That's what this page is. When that Crisis Moment hits, just look up the word Emergency in the InstaPunk search function and press the damn button up top. What you find will remind you of the stark reality everyone but you insists on forgetting today.
Persevere, my friends. You are not alone. Even when it feels like you are.
