Dear T,
Charlie Kirk was asked recently, at one of his lectures, whether now was a good time to "use the guns." He answered that it wasn't, and I agree with him -- but only partially for the reasons he stated.
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| The right-wing army, so far |
I would add to this that social and big media are owned almost entirely by the left-wing, which means we have no platform to mass-communicate. Do we run the CIA, or the FBI, or any national organization built to maintain law and order in a crisis? No -- all of it is in possession of the left-wing, which gives them a clear advantage in organization and persecution.
But even if we did own some institutions, I would posit that these United States are so completely interdependent that any kind of real split, even without bloodshed, would result in mass starvation and eventually death. This isn't the 1860's, when clothes could be homespun and farms were all family owned. There isn't a single business in these states that maintains its existence within a single state: everyone is dependent on other businesses in other states, and many times in other countries, to supply what they need to function on even a basic level.
Consider then the national corporations, where so many Americans are employed, each of them necessarily based in a single state. Cut off the head and suddenly you're left with a bunch of dead limbs -- Walmart, Amazon, Applebees, Target, Tesla, Boeing, Chevrolet, ad infinitum: companies which, in the event of a war, would immediately cease to function cross-country, are oftentimes dependent on one another, and would immediately throw a hundred million out of work, if not more. And I haven't mentioned agribusiness here, or Big Pharma, or all the thousands of companies that make computer chips and innumerable widgets which none of us know about but we're extremely dependent upon.
This isn't even considering water sources and power grids: two things which have the potential to wreck life as we know it, and send whole regions into anarchy and the Bronze Age. Where are the power plants? The transmission lines? What are the sources of power -- dams, or coal, or solar, or nuclear? Idaho Power is only one company, and they power large parts of Oregon. Who powers the others? What do we do if credit cards won't work? And what about banks in general? How do we get gas to the gas stations -- and know if they'll be able to pump gas anyway without electricity? And who will own and run the phone towers? The right-wing yahoo claims to love free enterprise so much -- could he have forgotten how businesses work, and where?
What we would be talking about, assuming any kind of civil war were to get underway, is a drastic shift in living standards that would require, upon the start of things, a strong central government, ready to provide the basic necessities and put millions of people to work immediately -- a kind of government typically known as "war fascism," which is the type of government the libertarian hot-heads are worst at, and to which at bottom they're morally opposed.
So I would urge them to give their "dream" up. The answer to American differences, at least for the foreseeable future, will never be civil war. And in fact, I don't believe many right-wingers think it is. But I'm tired of the poorly thought-out, unserious moralistic responses to the hot-heads -- who require a firm no, as all yahoos do, and not the mamby-pamby suit-and-tie "violence is not the answer" non-answers they've been getting.
In the meantime, I would advise them to consider Tolstoy's observation in Anna Karenina, that
There are people who when they meet a rival, no matter in what, at once shut their eyes to everything good in him and see only the bad. There are others who on the contrary try to discern in a lucky rival the qualities which have enabled him to succeed, and with aching hearts seek only the good in him.
So take the latter route. See how the liberals crush us in everything we call silly -- which is actually important. Stay armed and informed, but go into acting, writing, singing, and teaching. In other words make a dent on the culture of the nation, and try for once to be interesting instead of just winning a bunch of arguments. Life, after all, is passed on through things as embarrassing as sex -- and never through lectures.
Yours,
-J
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