holdfast
Winning battles and winning fights is often a matter of guts and grit. Often the winner is the guy who is too stupid and/or too stubborn to know he’s beaten. War is not about who is right, it is about who is left.
Very well said, and very true. That reminds me of a really great story about Stonewall Jackson…but I will spare you. However things aren’t nearly so bleak as you think. Yes, we are truly our own worst enemy, or some of us are anyway. That has been true at least since we (or some of us anyway) gave away the secret of the atomic bomb to the Russians. That is one meaning of “we have met the enemy and it is us”.
To be cheered up, consider a few points. We have not had a major attack, a crazy Muslim sniper, or a deadly poison attack in the mail for three whole years. Did you believe that likely or even possible three years ago? Do you remember when the entire airline industry had to go on life support after 9/11? We’ve resuscitated it. We have brought back our entire economy from the brink of what looked like the Second Great Depression. We’re getting even richer now. We have forcibly removed a truly evil cult in what has historically been the elephant’s graveyard of great armies and we did it with very little cost. We removed one of the world’s most evil dictators and his supposedly formidable army. We have exposed the perfidy of some of our alleged allies at no extra cost to our intelligence apparatus. We have learned how corrupt and worthless the United Nations is; surely that information alone is worth many thousands of American lives. And the internal perfidy of our major news organs is being exposed daily to an entirely new generation who had no idea and were all set to buy the bridge. Last but not least, we are starting, as Catherine says, to heal the wounds from Vietnam and to create a national narrative with which we can all live.
Through all of this we have continued scientific and technical breakthroughs at such a pace that the rest of the world can only sit back and stare in wonder, building a highway in Antarctica and sending dual robots to each side of Mars, our eyes raised to loftier heights as though the Muslim Islamofascists are scarcely worthy of our notice. As indeed they are.
Things looked much worse in 1864 and in 1942 than they do now. We survived and thrived, at least partly for the reasons outlined in Ralph Peters’s excellent essay linked above. We haven’t lost our nerve. We’re just still suffering from a political auto-immune disease, political lupus. But further attacks, like the prospect of hanging, will do wonders to clarify our collective minds.
I think that Knucklehead (and Sting) are right: moonbats go crazy in congregations, they only get better one by one. We all have a duty, I believe, a duty to our country and a duty to our own survival, to start to calmly and persistently convert the moonbats, one wrong-headed idea at a time. When we ourselves are wrong we should admit it cheerfully and change our narrative accordingly. Unlike Muslims, we are in charge of our future–we have free will and God expects us to use it wisely–and we need not submit to those maleficent people and ideas we see all around us. We shall overcome.
