Slowly Boiled Frogs: Have Americans Lost their Capacity For Rage?
Guest post by Lawrence Sellin
Although a minority are content living in a Stalinist dystopia, most aware Americans seem to have lost their sense of outrage as they have quietly accepted the gradual dismantling of our constitutional republic, the impoverishment of our Middle Class and the degradation of our history and culture by a corrupt and perverted political aristocracy, who have now abandoned even the illusion of democracy to implement a globalist one-party authoritarian state.
A virus created in a Chinese laboratory caused a three-year pandemic under which unnecessary, destructive and draconian policies were implemented that eroded civil liberties, damaged public health, undermined trust in science, sabotaged election integrity and destroyed the economy.
Yet, not only has no one been held accountable, many of those complicit in the demolition of the country have been rewarded.
We learned this past week that Pfizer, the pharmaceutical company responsible for an arguably unsafe and ineffective COVID-19 vaccine, in order to sustain profits, has been engaging in viral “gain of function” research, the very activity that caused the pandemic, thus potentially exposing the world to even more dangerous pathogens.
Yet, there is no outrage.
The current situation in the country was predictable, if not inevitable.
On October 26, 2016, prior to Donald Trump’s unexpected victory in the presidential election, I wrote an article in The Hill entitled “There is no place for me in Hillary’s America.”
What I described in that 2016 article, some of which is quoted below, was simply delayed by Trump’s Presidency.
I consider myself a patriot, someone who believes in the Constitution, the rule of law and representative government.
Under a President Hillary Clinton, none of those will any longer exist.
Electing Hillary will mean, quite literally, the end of the United States as it was originally designed.
The Constitution will be de facto obsolete; the rule of law will be arbitrarily applied dependent upon one’s financial status or political clout; and we will have a government driven by crony capitalism and political expediency, benefitting only the rich and powerful, and one conspicuous for corruption, fraudulent elections and pseudo-representation.
Under Hillary’s open borders policy, the United States of America will be neither United nor America. It will not be a melting pot, a nation guided by the notion of E Pluribus Unum, but a collection of simultaneous arguments, where the only thing we have in common is our differences.
It will mean a president, who is, without any doubt, hopelessly corrupt and a pathological liar.
It will mean that the organs of government will not be used to enforce the law, but to enforce the political whims of Hillary Clinton, courtesy of the Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Internal Revenue Service.
Because, when blatant and outrageous lies are no longer sufficient to soothe the electorate into complacency, such a government must begin to curtail freedom and oppress the people in order to pursue its policies and remain in power.
For me, one who traveled in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe during the Cold War, Hillary’s approach to government has a familiar ring.
In “Mountain of Crumbs”, a memoir of childhood in the 1960s and 1970s propaganda-soaked Soviet Union, Elena Gorokhova explains the meaning of “vranyo”, the Russian word for “a white lie or half-truth:”
“In Russia we played the ‘vranyo’ game on a daily basis. The government lied to us, we knew they were lying, they knew we knew they were lying, but they kept lying anyway and we pretended to believe them.”
“In practice vranyo provided a coping mechanism for both unbearable tragedies and petty annoyances. Can’t feed your starving children? Tear up a piece of bread to make a mountain of crumbs and declare it an abundance of food.”
There is no outrage because, like the Soviet Union, Americans have been conditioned to accept unaccountability, in which lying and incompetence are expected behavior of the leadership class.
Without justifiable rage, we are all simply slouching towards tyranny.
Lawrence Sellin, Ph.D. is retired U.S. Army Reserve colonel and a veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq. He had a civilian career in international business and medical research. Dr. Sellin is the author of Restoring the Republic: Arguments for a Second American Revolution. His email address is [email protected].