Bringing Down the Bank

I don’t get much pleasure in bashing the president. Neither do I get much pleasure from hearing the president being bashed. And I suspect that most of you who read this blog are getting tired of it as well. For far too long I’ve been posting comments that you’d have been entirely justified in skipping over because you already knew what I was going to say. And it would have merely meant that you had already moved beyond. ’Beyond’ does not mean wallowing in cynicism, cheap shots, and burying one’s head in endless minutia. It means looking past what we now see and can no longer change.

The simple truth of the matter is that we’re all collectively heading to a place where we’ve never been before. And we’re scared. Obama isn’t the problem. He is just the most accessible manifestation of our overall disease. No matter who had been elected president back in 2008, he or she would have brought us to the same place. We all are subject to the tide of history which is greater than ourselves. The fact is that our shore line stands seriously eroded and any protective measures we might take this late in the game would turn out to be woefully inadequate.

To begin with, it’s all been decided already within the highest levels of academia. They’ve set our course and stamped it with their seal of unanimous approval. Conservatism has lost the argument. There was never the possibility of compromise. To undo anything now would require a revolution even greater than the one we’re presently experiencing.

I am an American, first and foremost. I am clearly not a Socialist. As such, I am not a Democrat. This is because history tells us that socialism does not work. I realize that in order to make such a statement, one has to come to some common understanding of how to determine if something works (or not).

Clearly, Socialists think that socialism works - that it is fairer, kinder and more compassionate. I would gladly forget history and even stipulate to that much if I thought the people at the top actually loved America. I’ve heard the argument that proper socialism can only happen here in America; that the reason it has failed in other places was because they were not yet ready; that these had not gone through the necessary steps after which socialism can be effective. America, they argue is now ready to embrace socialism precisely because it has gone through a period in which capitalism has been discredited. They view socialism as the highest evolution of effective human governance toward which capitalism is only a stepping stone.

Socialism, Marxism, Maoism, Communism, are all the same to me. I’ve never been able to split hairs so precisely as to ascertain a difference. Again, I would stipulate to it all if I had even the slightest notion that those promoting these concepts actually loved America - but they don’t.

A man walks into a bank, pulls a gun and tells the tellers to hand over the money. They smile nervously and accede to his request. He leaves the bank a happy man. Maybe some hero bank guard gets popped in the process. At any rate, it’s over. The rest is left up to the cops and the insurance companies.

Now consider a man coming into that same bank wearing a suicide vest - say, on the last Thursday of the month, in the late afternoon when lines have been forming with people all cashing their pay or welfare checks. The man does not want money. He wants to bring down the bank. This is what I fear is happening in our nation right now.