America as a Wonderful Life...
if we can keep it

In my lifetime of 70 years, this country has become dramatically less free. Things that were legal and free, entirely unencumbered by any laws or restrictions are now totally illegal or tightly limited. Free speech was an absolute right when I was young, now it is considered unacceptable by most of the media for ordinary persons, and it absolutely forbidden on college campuses. Gun rights are severely restricted in many ways, although we now have the ability to legally carry concealed weapons in 42 states or more. We have actual Second Amendment rights to "keep and bear arms" in about 13 or 14 states. We cannot purchase automobiles of our choosing....only ones which meet increasingly expensive and restrictive federal requirements. Those requirements have eliminated full sized sedans and station wagons with large V8 engines, historically our first choices. Today, large size and large engines are only available via a loophole in the federal regulations as "trucks", so SUVs are our federally mandated substitutes for normal large cars and station wagons. And most people haven't even noticed. And we accept all these massive intrusions on our freedoms with little pushback. In fact, about half of the country wants MORE restrictions on freedoms, more government control, and wants the Constitution bypassed entirely. We have lost a huge amount in my lifetime, and I don't see it being reversed without large scale bloodshed and/or a partition of the country as seen in Kurt Schlichter's dystopian future novels. I dearly wish that it could be and will be otherwise, but I cannot see any path back to real freedom otherwise. In the last 10,000 years of human history, there has never been as free and economically prosperous place as the United States of America. Perhaps some upper social classes for some short periods in ancient Rome, may have come close, but otherwise, human history is a litany of poverty, deprivation and a lack of freedom, the common man living in fear of the rich an powerful in almost all places and all times. It seems that we are reverting back to "the norm" very rapidly, I am sad to say.

We have the highest standard of living in the world, the greatest personal freedom, opportunities of every kind abound. We should be the happiest people on earth. How is it, then, that our country is torn apart? I think China has waged a relentless covert war on America, which burst out into the open with their release of COVID-19 to destroy our economy and prevent-- they believed-- Donald Trump's reelection. But for decades they have poured money into academia and planted spies to spread the anti-American message to our young men and women. Same with the entertainment industry, which through every outlet pumps out anti-American propaganda on a daily basis. They are behind Antifa and BLM, and consider for a moment how just those two organisations have wreaked havoc on our country. They managed to take a country whose citizens should be filled with gratitude and turn black against white, liberal against conservative, gay against straight-- in short, to pound the tips of wedges into every tiny fissure of our society and split it into mutually hostile fragments. Today, in the greatest country on earth, all one hears is talk of civil war.

A very good simile. And the never Trumpers want Potterville. They want their Deep State, their entrenched bureaucrats, their endless rules and regulations, their non-flushing toilets, non-washing dishwashers, non-moving cars, non-lighting lightbulbs, navigable puddles, and all the rest. After all, the U S was built by bureaucracy. You didn't build that. Edison did nothing. Shockley did nothing. DARPA had nothing to do with the internet. If it were not for Government, we would not lead the free world. It took a village to build Boeing. Oh, yes. Capitalism is evil. We need to get back to the wonderful Communist colony in Boston in 1620, where nobody owned anything and everybody almost starved to death. Yeah, that's the ticket. From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs. Marx forever. I think it is time for some angels to sing.