Posted by
VBushmills on Tuesday, November 17, 2009 4:15:00 PM
Richmond, November 18, 2009
Time stopped for about four hours on Sunday, December, 1941. When it started up again virtually everyone...everyone...knew that the life they had known on December 6th would be no more...forever. Still, they did a complete three-sixty (as Maxine Waters is prone to say) and moved forward. They still went to work and school, and window shopping. The movies were almost the same as they were before, except for the Movietone reel. The magazines looked almost the same as they had before. It was just that everything...everything...was dipped in that large vat of boiling oil called "the war". For 150 million people, life was turned up on its end. For a million, it ended altogether.
This didn't happen after 9/11. The "event" lasted about a week, maybe two, and then we all went back to work once we'd seen that the terrorists didn't have another immediate plan up their sleeve. The rest, the war in Afghanistan, then Iraq, well, the government seemed to have that in control. We followed it in the newspapers, on television, but except for the million or so with loved ones in harm's way, the other 249 million didn't really pay much attention. We worried about our weight, our new cell plan and dithered with our iPods, "texted" then tweeted, and moved on toward our personal 12/7.
Individually, life rarely flips as it did after 12/7. A car crash, a sudden catastrophic illness in the family, a new born with special needs, all these occur daily, still they never invade the people as a whole. Mass unemployment comes closer, as we've seen in the past year, rising from 4% to nearly seventeen. Still, the vast majority walk around as if it still is, and always will be, December 6th.
It's a good thing we don't have targets on our backs, as the Jews did in the 1930s.
Or do we?
As many Christians, for one reason, conservatives for another, and still others for other reason, all saw in the language of Barack Obama and the company he kept, and now keeps, there is ample reason to pick up one's belongings and move to a safer haven. In 1933 many Jews begin doing just that, as Hitler finally took power and began moving toward dong what he'd said all along he was going to do.
But the majority of Jews didn't. They just couldn't believe that Hitler could or would turn their lives upside down...and in this belief they were sheltered by the comfort and protection of their own habits....nice house, employment, a post at the university, the hospital. Those nightmare scenarios don't happen to civilized people...at the hands of "civilized" people.
Well, we all know the rest of that story.
We also know that of those who can tally their odds and have the money, many do move. Even Rush Limbaugh has threatened to go to New Zealand.
But most of us couldn't move if we wanted to. Where? Mexico? Canada? No, we either hunker down or we fight, and if history is any indicator, most of us hunker down....especially if we are guaranteed the basic elements of life...work (of sorts), food (of sorts) and a place to live (of sorts). It's a basic law of life that, when faced with losing those three things, Liberty comes in a far distant fourth.
You can then see why it was such a big deal, a meaningful deal, the real deal, when the signers of the Declaration of Independence pledged their "lives, fortunes and sacred honor", for they all did just that. Most lost their fortunes, their homes, many of their children, had bounties placed on their heads, and fought a war, in one way or another for six long years.
It's almost time we have to start choosin' up sides....Hunker down, or fight. These are things you need to start thinking about now, not the day after Election Day, 2010.
Vassar Bushmills