Fear

Right now, in these past few months I have felt something that I never would have imagined that I could. I am afraid for my country. I was born during the Korean “police action” and grew up during the cold war. I watched the Kennedy / Nixon debates and remember not liking the Vice President. We never did duck and cover drills. We listened to, and were uplifted by the Presidents inaugural, and I never felt threatened during the Cuban missile crisis. I watched on Television as the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Nikita Khrushchev) pounded his shoe on the podium at the United Nations and swore that the Soviet Union would “bury” us. I read my first article about advisers in Viet Nam in a Weekly Reader. I learned about Japanese aggression and surprise, and about European entanglements and a world gone mad. And then there seemed to be a glimmer of light with the unofficial end of the cold war, but now it’s gone. I have always believed that the Federal Republic of states that IS the United States of America would stand as it was founded against every storm, every opposing force. Our “instruction manual”, our “founding documents” are intact and I have always believed in their sanctity, their primacy, and that followed faithfully they would protect us from every enemy. But now I am afraid. What I fear is not an opposing force, not an external enemy which is easily enough identified and defeated. What I fear now is an enemy within.

When I was a teen (during the 60s) I wanted to be a pacifist. I wanted to believe as the rest of my generation seemed to that my country was bad, that capitalism was bad. I just couldn’t. My parents weren’t political and I was surprised to find out after I was in my 20s that they hadn’t voted for Kennedy. I just couldn’t make any sense out of the alternative to capitalism. I read the news and listened to Walter Kronkite. I read Animal Farm. I knew that you could be killed for trying to escape from the East to the West. What was the rational behind that reality if it wasn’t that what we had, and have still wasn’t and isn’t better than what “they” had?

And so in the 60s and 70s there were bombings and violent protests and they were put down. The organizers then watched as their fellow students chose to join society in stead of changing it. And you began to see Dead Head stickers on Cadillacs. But the domestic enemies of the United States weren’t stupid. They could see that there was no future in directly opposing the government. And so they went underground and legit. They became educators and organizers but their goal never changed. They still want to bring down capitalism and the United States of America. And their methods are insidious. They’re using the very freedoms that our systems provide the very compassion that we feel, and the openness that we live under to stab at our heart. Just like the World Trade Center highjackers, they plan to start uncontrollable fires in our system with the knowledge that, at some point, it simply won’t bear the weight anymore and will collapse in on itself. Then, they believe, that they will be able to come in and say “See what this horrible thing has caused?” “See what strife this Republic has wrought?” And then put forth the failed Marxist policies of the former Soviet Union as the solution.

I have seen much in my short life, but I have never been afraid till now.

You should be too.

But that's just what an average guy thinks.