Things are falling apart.
How much longer we can sustain the fiction that we live in a constitutional republic, I cannot say, but anarchy is being loosed upon the nation.
We are witnessing the unraveling of the American dream one injustice at a time.
Day after day, the government's crimes against the citizenry grow more egregious, more treacherous and more tragic. And day after day, the American people wake up a little more to the grim realization that they have become captives in a prison of their own making.
No longer a free people, we are now pushed and prodded and watched over by twitchy, hyper-sensitive, easily-spooked armed guards who care little for the rights, humanity or well-being of those in their care.
The death toll is mounting.
The carnage is heartbreaking.
The public's faith in the government to do its jobwhich is to protect our freedomsis deteriorating.
The warning signs are everywhere.
"Things fall apart," wrote W.B. Yeats in his dark, forbidding poem "The Second Coming." "The centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world."
The upcoming election and its aftermath will undoubtedly keep the citizenry divided and at each other's throats, so busy fighting each other that they never manage to present a unified front against tyranny in any form. Yet the winner has already been decided.
Nothing will change.
You cannot have a republican form of government nor a democratic one, for that matter, when the government views itself as superior to the citizenry, when it no longer operates for the benefit of the people, when the people are no longer able to peacefully reform their government, when government officials cease to act like public servants, when elected officials no longer represent the will of the people, when the government routinely violates the rights of the people and perpetrates more violence against the citizenry than the criminal class, when government spending is unaccountable and unaccounted for, when the judiciary act as courts of order rather than justice, and when the government is no longer bound by the laws of the Constitution.
How much longer we will continue to suffer at the hands of a tyrannical police state depends on how much we're willing to give up for the sake of freedom.
For the moment, the American people seem content to sit back and watch the reality TV programming that passes for politics today. It's the modern-day equivalent of bread and circuses, a carefully calibrated exercise in how to manipulate, polarize, propagandize and control a population. This presidential election is yet another pacifier to lull us into complacency and blind us to the monsters in our midst.
I refuse to be pacified, patronized or placated.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).