good article on vigilantism

I think it’s far too easy to point fingers at the fringe and label it mainstream. It’s reckless, as a matter of fact. If the proverbial squeaky wheel gets the grease than the extreme ideologues are well lubricated. People are angry and scared, by and large because every governmental function they’ve been taught to uphold and believe in has failed them. An overstatement? Perhaps. Was the alleged race bating and spitting the extreme exception? Was the radical left bombings, behavior, and protesting in the late 60’s the exception? The vitriol sells the news. Banks, jobs, war, race, wages, immigration, terrorism; everything is now open to intense emotional dialogue and pain.

It’s our inability to trust and communicate that fuels this. Trust for the government has leapt off the precipice. Look at the latest confidence polling on Congress; staggering. Polling and data aside, most people see the following; higher taxes, diminishment of service, pandering to the extreme ideologies, erosion of influence, and a monumental disconnect with their elected representation. In a society that has become expectant of a particular lifestyle and safety, both are now under attack. Is this the back side of exceptionalism or entitlement? How can any leader look into a camera and assure Americans we will bounce back? How can any elected official, most of them not being among the plebeians in decades, make the case for understanding? That’s the communications part. Do we have officials who take this obligation as sacrosanct and serve their constituents? Absolutely. So where are they?

Hard, hard decisions lie ahead. Unsustainable is an aphorism pitched about. How are we going to do this? If you find yourself in a hole the best course of action to take first is stop digging. There must be real dialogue and hard work and shared sacrifice to right this vessel. Are up to the task? How can we spend twice as much on health care as European counterparts and Canada and have the 50th worse life expectancy in the world? So we enact a partisan, expensive health care plan that never takes into account these aforementioned costs? If you don’t have the time to do it right the first time, how much time will you need to fix it? A trillion is a digit with twelve zeroes…1,000,000,000,000.00. It’s a number so large mathematicians avoid it because its cumbersome and virtually non existent in their field…and yet we continue to add that number to itself to fix ourselves… If we are not all to blame, clearly we all will pay. Again, staggering.

Also, this in not the first push back we’ve seen from the citizenry; it is however, the most televised.

Do we need more government or better government?

If all we have to fear is fear itself than I’ve seen the enemy; he is us. Are we fulfilling UBL’s prophesy? Our lifestyle and erosion of ethics has cost us much and the bill is/has come due.

There is no utopia or doomsday attitude here; just a simple pragmatism. Two quotes sum this up for me; “You are what you repeatedly do; excellence therefore is not an act but a habit”; Aristotle. The other is the definition of insanity; “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”. Albert Einstein

We are insanely doing the same thing over and over again and have become what we’ve repeatedly done.

I suspect that this is not the last we’ve seen of national extremism. Are there more
McVeigh’s out there? What’s next? We’ve seen encouragement to walk away from our commitments like homes and loans, because the banks did it. Until ideology is left out, it will only get worse. I don’t like being told my entire life and belief system is a lie; a falsehood. Multiply that my hundreds, thousands, and millions. Others do not like being told the same thing. Canaries in a coal mine?

What are we going to do about it?

Thanks for posting this. Perhaps this and other forums will begin a necessary dialogue to overcome our addictions and consumptions and move forward to achieve e pluribus Unum.