I guess I'm writing again.
I was planning on returning later than this, I had a whole set of new posts and stories I’d been working on to get ready for the site; to bring it all back at once with a running work schedule that I could adhere to and a head start on the work I needed to have done. Then someone on my youtube feed posted a video, one I wasn’t sure how to react to. A once always cheerful eternal optimist turned livid with anger and frustration. It made a surreal event, one I had almost become completely numb to because I had a certain assuredness that such a thing might happen, into something I know I must and do care very much about.
Many might know if you go back into my history on this site that I stopped posting around the 2016 election, I became frustrated and disillusioned in any action I could take of words I could use to affect change. I don’t care about any of that anymore. This is a time I cannot stay silent even if everything I say falls on deaf ears, even if it all is ultimately meaningless.
I once told a friend of mine that if the government came for his guns he’d turn them over. That’s still a thing I believe about everyone boasting so fervently over the last few weeks about how they can about their rights, and claiming they won't be beholden to a tyrannical government. That’s because by the time the government comes for your guns they have already gone tyrannical. When they come for your guns it is too late to stand up to them, too late to effect any change with your actions of resistance. At that point, you already lost.
Authoritarians don’t start with saying they’ll take your guns away, they start with being divisive, being anti-press and ultimately being anti-first amendment. They go after news organizations and try to control all information, they shut down protests and advocate for police violence against such things.
That brings me to my main point here. Donald Trump has committed the act of an authoritarian in his photo op in front of St. John’s church. He had federal agents fire teargas and rubber munitions on peaceful protests so that he could cross the park unhindered. All so he could get a photo of himself standing in front of the church holding a bible upside down. One of the priests of the church was expelled from the area with the protesters.
The warning to the protesters was far lacking in what would be expected. His speech was not about getting this back under control instead it was about violence and military presence should the protests not be brought to heel. More violence to answer the violence already in action. “An eye for an eye will leave the world blind.”
I am currently writing a piece about division and unity and why division is so dangerous. There is a lot of thought and effort being poured into it so I can get my words right. Then a thing like this happens.
All over I see all those people who claim to be pro-rights, anti-tyranny staying silent, or even praising Trump for his courage in walking across the park in such a troubled time. When the government comes for your guns, it will come from a path you walked down yourself.
“We find ourselves in the peaceful possession of the fairest portion of the earth, as regards extent of territory, fertility of soil, and salubrity of climate. We find ourselves under the government of a system of political institutions, conducing more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty, than any of which the history of former times tells us. We, when mounting the stage of existence, found ourselves the legal inheritors of these fundamental blessings.
We toiled not in the acquirement or establishment of them — they are a legacy bequeathed us, by a once hardy, brave, and patriotic, but now lamented and departed race of ancestors. Theirs was the task (and nobly they performed it) to possess themselves, and through themselves, us, of this goodly land; and to uprear upon its hills and its valleys, a political edifice of liberty and equal rights; ’tis ours only, to transmit these, the former, unprofaned by the foot of an invader; the latter, undecayed by the lapse of time and untorn by usurpation, to the latest generation that fate shall permit the world to know. This task of gratitude to our fathers, justice to ourselves, duty to posterity, and love for our species in general, all imperatively require us faithfully to perform.
How then shall we perform it? — At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it? — Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never! — All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years.
At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”
-Abraham Lincoln
When we are divided and against ourselves is when we are at our weakest. It is when we are most easily managed. It is when we turn against ourselves and make each other the enemy that we are destroyed. I’ll probably expand on my opinions later in Division and Unity, look forward to it being put together in the next coming weeks.
I’ll leave a link to the youtube video in question, you should definitely watch it.