The End or the Beginning?

One has to worry that yesterday marked the beginning of the march to the end of the world as we know it. Maybe more accurately, maybe it marked the beginning of the return to a world from which our ancestors recoiled. America has lived through a lawless history before. The last significant one was in 1968, the year that I was sent to war, presumable in harm’s way. From the accounts we heard, there was plenty of harm awaiting those who didn’t go to war. Just ask Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy. That period seemed to have its ending point when, on May 4^th, 1970, some of our brothers in the Ohio National Guard fired upon some of our brothers and sisters on the campus of Kent State University, killing four and wounding nine more.

The nation recoiled and began to heal itself.

Yesterday, though, was the first time one of our sacred places were invaded by the lawless who were members of our own national congress and whose actions were suborned  by the President of the United States of America. To borrow a phrase from a far better president, it was "date which will live in infamy ... ."

It was a sad day and one that will lead us to take a fork in the road of the fate of our nation. One road will let to anarchy of the type once described in a novel folks thought ludicrous at the time, It Can’t Happen Here, by Sinclair Lewis. The other fork could, by national revulsion to its action, lead us back to a road of relative harmony.

Taking a warning from Mr. Lewis, we need to watch for the appearance of brown-shirted gangs calling themselves such names as “Trump’s Troopers,” “Posses of Purity, “Nuklaverns,” or “Der Braunhemden.” That will signal the end.

Let us hope that instead we see a national revulsion to the acts of few yesterday. It can’t simply be a revulsion from progressive students of history, though. It must come within the incubators that spawned such a hideous act.

After all, this is America, still. We can at least hope so.