Note to Readers: Since my piece about cops and convoys appeared yesterday on American Thinker, this newsletter (which still needs a better name!) has enjoyed a steady stream of new subscribers. Welcome to all of you, and thanks for subscribing!
I am going to presume that, if you came here via American Thinker, even though my newsletter’s content is by no means exclusively political, you may be expecting more political material. I certainly don’t want to disappoint anyone, and I have plenty of political material I can post.
What I’m going to do right now is to recycle a piece I wrote back in November of 2008; back then I was a contributing editor of a now-defunct site, created by Jack Cashill, called KCNewswatch.com. Much of my writing for that site is now quite out-of-date, but there are some pieces that still retain some “resonance” in the context of current events, and I hope that this is one of them.
Reading it now, I think, “Gee, just how prescient was I?” Certainly not nearly as prescient as George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Ray Bradbury or H.G. Wells, who saw the way things were headed long before I ever did; some people nowadays quip that those works were intended as warnings, not as instruction books!
But I think, sadly, that I had a pretty good vision of where “the fundamental transformation of America” promised by Barack Obama (whose “third term” we are currently experiencing) was headed.
It Can't Happen Here? 11-4-08
Did you encounter long lines at your polling place Tuesday?
Well, don't worry. It might just be the shape of things to come.
If an Obama administration is installed and succeeds in its long-range Marxist goals, we may find ourselves standing on line for bread, meat or milk like folks in Cuba or N. Korea or any other workers' paradise where profit is unpatriotic and the government makes sure all "wealth" is distributed "fairly" (and Stalinist enforcement ensures compliance and punishes ambition). So we might as well get used to it.
Could that possibly happen here, in the United States, the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, the Land of Plenty, the Land of the Big PX? Of course not! Don't be silly! Why, that's just a foolish, alarmist scenario!
It's ridiculous to think that it would ever get to that point. Why, even if we were to actually elect a president whose true agenda sought to destroy free enterprise (as well as our other freedoms) in the name of "fairness," well, we'd just vote him out again, just as the people have done in Cuba, Venezuela, Cambodia, N. Korea or Zimbabwe, 'Right?
That we would vote away our freedom and prosperity is every bit as ridiculous a notion as, for example, back when some folks envisioned that recognizing "gay rights" would someday lead to homosexuals demanding the right to marry one another and adopt children, or result in society being forced to change its definition of what constitutes "normal" or "deviant."
We all know what a silly, alarmist prediction that was! We all know better than to give credence to alarmist fantasies.
Why worry over nothing? The dystopias of "1984,” "Brave New World," "Fahrenheit 451" or "The Shape of Things to Come" will never come to pass. We all know that the American people would never permit things to go that far!
When I was a little boy long, long ago and I was about 12 or 13 years old (I'm 77 now), my father was stationed in Eastern Cuba. I vividly remember sitting around our large dining room table during our weekly gathering with family and friends. A couple of years earlier Castro had attacked, unsuccessfully, the Moncada Cuban military base - only a few miles from where we lived. Indubitably, the conversation after dinner over brandy and cups of Cuban coffee, would turn to politics and Fidel Castro. A spectrum of opinions were always articulated and intensely discussed and when one expressing the fear of potential communism coming to the island, the response by a vast majority of those in attendance was always the same: “That will never happen here.” After 60 miserable years of enslavement under communism, without freedom of any kind, we now know how dreadfully wrong they were. But I’m definitely sure that it just can’t happen here.
Gee, can we say ..... "It's like Deja-vu all over again" ?!?!
Sadly, it's hats off to the Radical Liberal Progressive movement with the Democratic Party as they have advanced their ideology and implemented many of their "fundamental changes" in spite of the fact we saw it coming and thought, as you title your article - "It Can't Happen Here"
Trump and his supporters were a disruption to their force, so to speak. I don't know that Trump's return is the answer, but we desperately need to get that momentum back and stop this destruction of America.
BTW ..... I picked up your Newsletter through Bookworm Room not American Thinker and look forward to reading more of your articles!