Things To Come

I grew up on a weekly dose of morality plays at Saturday matinees at our local movie theater from the mid-1940s until the early-1950s, called Westerns. Then came our first TV and the tempo increased to almost daily as the Horse Operas migrated to the new medium. I learned many morality lessons through repetition. There were good guys and bad guys. The good guys wore white hats and the bad wore black. Good always won over bad and love was chaste. Good guys didn't lie and the bad ones always did. Good guys were brave and bad guys cowards. These lessons were drummed home with religious fervor. To be completely transparent, I was somewhat taken aback when I enlisted in the Army and was schooled in the art of the ambush, both executing it and defending against it. Bushwhackers, I had learned in the Westerns were the worst of the bad guys and here I was, learning to be one. For various reasons I dedicated my life in the service and outside of it, practicing the art of storytelling. Generally, I feel fairly competent but fail to equal the best whom I have ever seen. The storyteller in the video is dead on (and I mean "dead"). America is a house divided and the threat is existential just as it was during the American Revolution when Tories often outnumbered Revolutionaries and the issue was never certain. And it was divided in the time of the American Civil War. And it was divided in the 1940s with many prominent Americans rooting for Hitler (including my father who waxed poetic in the years following WWII about the world that might have been had Hitler won). Well, here we are divided once more and the threat, as Bill Whittle explains, is existential (threatening to the nation's very existence). Yes, the enemy is inside the wire. And both camps can claim adherents among those here on RP. You'll soon see them in battle in the discussion thread that this posting hopefully inspires. I hope I don't have to tell you which camp has my allegiance.