From Billy Beck:
By the first decade of the twenty-first century, people who lived in the United States were voting for their lives.
By then, too many of them had no way of knowing how evil this could be, because they had never lived what had been lost; a middle-aged person could recall vestiges, at least, of a common-sense approach to life communicable to nearly everyone around him in any matter of everyday conduct, where many a grown man or woman in their early twenties or even thirties could not. There were millions of them. They had been reared by people who had grown — themselves — soft in the head over what reality was and whether it could be “socially constructed”, in any of myriad ways. The lot of them were intellectually and psychologically adrift on tides of sensation (they would always state how they felt, even or especially in matters demanding thought, and they could not tell the difference) constantly afire with activism, advocacy, struggle, reports, investigations, studies, organizations (and associations), mandates, orders, parties, leaders, special interests, and democracy. And the central (if not only) thing that was true about them was that they were herds.
It’s terrible to say it, of course, but it must be said that the bovine analogy is very apt at analyzing these straits of the early twenty-first American century. This was a mass of humans whose lot had fallen well below its nature in the metaphysically general aspect: individuals in wholesale numbers had evidently lost command of principally human faculties such as language, and this does not refer to the niceties such as pronunciation and syntax, but more importantly to the function of the language itself, which is to transmit concepts (the fruit of cognition) among individuals. This was a creeping debility, whose final manifestations in political matters could not explain to its sufferers what was happening to them as it happened. Their cognitions generally ran to the sideways glance at the flow of the mass and common pleas to “have a nice day” amid general mayhem.
They commonly called themselves Americans and claimed all sorts of alien nonsense as “American”, meaning: values (mainly ideas) which are contrary to the ethics and politics of individualism which brought their nation imperfectly into the world but which were all that could ever sustain or save it. That their forebears had erected a polity whose merest administrations were executed at theoretically popular command was bad enough (even after Benjamin Franklin had warned whether they could “keep it”). That this instrument of power had devolved to such naked graspings as they had since the turn of the twenty-first century was really only the basic logic of the thing extended to its integral conclusion: the political power which is a necessary element of government always finds its way to the hearts, minds and hands of individuals in the name of the masses. The masses, having been groomed to their place per se, became militantly supplicant to individuals who made their livings at pretending to know how everyone else should live and strutting that basic pretense into positions of command authority.
Many people in the United States who might have read this would also have balked at the concept of “masses” before counting themselves as constituents. What was most important to their history, however, is that that small revolt was of no import. Once again, as in the ringing complaint of Thomas Paine centuries before but on the dawn of something new in history, the fugitive “freedom” was hunted ’round the world. This terrible fall in the standing of an idea was the whole cause of world misery on scales never conceived by their forebears, but people living in the United States were treated to — and indulged to the extent of their crippled mentation — terrible insults of cynicism drafted from questions whether “freedom” was any sort of value, or even existed at all. This, within less than a lifetime after the greatest conscious ideological crusades of the previous century had rallied Americans to its standard.
What mattered, then, was the right of might, and that’s why people who lived in the United States were voting for their lives.
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Reposted from Western Rifle Shooters Association
We move slowly through the dense morning fog, for all appearances simply dark shadows slipping silently through the forest. Each man constantly scans his area of responsibility around the patrol while also keeping track of each others disposition. Foot placement is carefully considered to avoid snapping twigs or rustling brush. Slippery moss-covered stones and logs are stepped over or around to avoid injury due to the burden of our heavy kit or leaving any sign of our passing. Branches in the way are lightly grasped with gloved hands, slowly moved to the side or up to allow for better vision and ease of movement. After passing they are slowly returned to their former position to avoid quick movement or noise when released and to avoid tell-tale breakage.
