This Fight: Right Here, Right Now

Martin McPhillips remarks:

"I have noted that the best that can be claimed for it is that it has been a holding action against a historical tide, and that if the levee holds there might be a path back. But from an immediate objective viewing, that is not a good prospect."

Last night, as I was thinking about things to say about the dispute that I've blown up, I wrote this:

"At this pace of history, there is far more to be recovered than can be managed at polls. Although this is immensely tragic in terms of individual lives, the real danger is in the loss of an ideal."

McPhillips goes on:

"On the question of owning what one owns and what one produces, Beck is saying that tolerating a lifetime of government taking as it pleases is too long."

What will inevitably happen is that, as these lifetimes drag on, the ideas that drive them will be lost in new generations of lives bred to an undertanding that those ideas are just as dead as the people who once lived them.

We are living in the last light of the world. Look around you. Even in the countries now celebrated by one & all as exemplary of "change", there is nothing like the ideas on which this nation once stood. In fact, all they're changing to is the ideas now touted by the neolibertarians. These people who presume political leadership in their own third way between Republicans and Democrats are on their way to meeting in the middle -- somewhere below them -- the aspirations of countless millions around the world who can't see anything better than being allowed to choose their masters. It's hard to blame them: they don't know what Americans know, and they never have. But it is unconscionable to hold out as American some "process" that cannot possibly address what's wrong in this country in anything like a recognizable human lifetime. And once those ideas get swamped under generations of lives bred to a democratic yoke, there is no telling how they could ever be resuscitated. Certainly, nobody else in the world will be able to do it for many decades, if not centuries.