Careful What You Wish For

July’s schedule hammered me like a tax audit. Simple pleasures were cancelled. I meant to camp and cut firewood and sail my little boat and rack up miles on my motorcycles… but I’ve done far less than I planned. Routine regular life bullshit and a bout of the flu kicked my ass.

On the other hand, the flu especially forced me to slow down. I had no alternative but to pay attention to the world beyond my campfire. Perhaps I should be thankful? It’s a case of “careful what you wish for”. God (or if you wish “fate”) gave me what I asked… good and hard. You may laugh or you may call me naïve but I’m spillin’ my guts with this post so please be gentle.

When the mighty Soviet Union imploded I was busy with other things. I always regretted my inattention. I knew the great flourishing of freedom was a planet wise surge in energy. I knew the massive changes were important, but I had a busy (and remote and news/internet free) life. I didn’t fully immerse myself in the moment. I regret that I let that shining moment pass without fully reflecting on it.

I expected that great moment to never be repeated in my lifetime. I’d skipped the party! What a dumbass!

The Berlin Wall fell and I did not celebrate. If you can’t celebrate the fall of that evil thing what can you celebrate?

Lech Walesa kicked ass in Poland. I was aware and wished him well of course, but didn’t pay much attention.

Same for Vaclav Havel. He dragged Czechoslovakia, kicking and screaming, into the free world. I hoped he’d succeed but I was busy and broke.

I rooted for the Russian people as their totalitarian prison teetered on the edge. But I didn’t “embrace the times”. USSR experimented with “Glasnost”. I saw where that was going. It’s hard to let off the pressure when you’ve kept people in a vice for generations! It went as well as one could hope. USSR, by now a dying desiccated zombie, faded hard and fast. Leadership cycled through Boris Yeltsin and hapless Mikhail Gorbachev; both flailing about. I don’t blame them. Navigating the transition from ossified repressive geezers to something approaching sanity is an impossible task. When Mikhail Gorbachev narrowly overcame a coup attempt in 1991, how close was the world to falling back into the crab pot? Through luck or chance or statesmanship, future generations were spared a life of embittered miserable poverty and communist oppression. When the coup fell through I was happy, but that’s it. I was otherwise too busy to care.

Am I a smart enough monkey to learn from past omissions? Well? Have I?

Last year, on August 24th, Fulton County Georgia booked Trump.We all knew Trump  had been subjected to “lawfare”. But until that day (just a year ago) it was possible to deny it.

That mug shot crossed a Rubicon. People who think the Orange Menace is the worst evil of all time think it’s worth it… but do they have limits at all? We are watching “lawfare” against a billionaire former President. If they can do it to him, they can do it to anyone. They can do it to you. If you’re happy because they’re doing it to Trump, remember the path ends with “one day they came to take me, and there was nobody left to protest.”

So long as “might makes right” none of us are safe. Reason and rules only protect us if they’re respected. In 2021 weren’t they ready to forcibly inject “vax deniers” faster than you can say “Nuremberg”? And what of cancelling? Or censorship? What of a society that will not utter publicly the words “false” or “lie” but freaks out about “misinformation”? What of the madness that we have of punishing “misinformation” that turns out to be true? When “minsinformation” is censored and punished it should be followed by retraction, atonement, and exoneration when it is found to be true! Without that you simply have a pile of lies made by people in authority. How many idiots incorrectly think Trump is guilty of “Russian collusion” and will think that to their dying day? What of our world where tolerance turned on a dime to became “bake me a cake bitch”?

Just so we’re clear, laws are still written in words and protections still exist, but it’s more theoretical than reliable. Anything done to Trump can be done to anyone. Anyone who can lawfare an “opponent” will do it to you if they wish. Absolute power corrupts. When the king, or a bureaucracy, or Stalin’s henchmen, or the Karen at the HOA can destroy a man simply because they want to; they will.

Now I get it. Shit isn’t doomed. None of us are in the Gulag yet. You can accept we’re not there yet while knowing where the path leads. A lot of people would be happy to drone strike Trump. One guy drew blood with a rifle. Judges in 4 states are bleeding his time, money, and options. But it’s just the start… or maybe the end.

How many times have I seen “dissidents” tossed in jail by powerful oppressors? Why did I shrug my shoulders and go back to work? I don’t know. Only that I saw it happen 30 years ago and I’m seeing it now and this time it’s not some far away place on TV news. I’m not exaggerating, there is no longer “it can’t happen here”. We literally watched it happen. Opposition party members getting arrested is a tale as old as time. We can snicker about “Banana Republics” but Biden was sworn in behind concertina wire, maintains a bunch of January 6th political prisoners, spent months or years non-compos mentis, before getting tossed not because he was unfit but because he was unpopular.

The shoe fits and we have to wear it.

In my effort to “pay attention and also remember”, I bought one of the overpriced coffee cups as soon as they hit the market. It’s not going to change the world, but it was the most minor of acknowledgements. I have observed an event and I know what it means. Does that make me a knuckle-dragging, sexist, racist, Nazi, Maga-tard dipshit? That’s what some would say. But that’s what they say about everything. And they enjoy saying it from positions of authority.

From my point of view, it was less about Trump than all the other dissidents I’d ignored. I’ll never have a Lech Walesa (Poland) coffee mug. I’ll never have one with the image of Vaclav Havel (Czechoslovakia). I was never a huge fan of Nelson Mandela (South Africa) but he’s definitely a dissident and he was arrested just like all those others.

Someone right now is sensing a disturbance in the force. I mention Orange Man Bad along with Lech Walesa, Vaclav Havel, and Nelson Mandela! They’re probably so upset they dropped their avocado toast all over their stack of pilfered ballots. Too bad. I don’t make things happen. I simply notice when they do.

Thanks in part to the flu I got to keep noticing. I’ll watch the whole show. It’ll lead either to the collapse of totalitarians or not. (And not just in America either. There’s instability all over the planet.)

Good outcomes are not guaranteed. It’s a mixed bag. Poland and Russia and East Germany went through the death throes of oppression but barely fired a shot. Czechoslovakia split in half, mostly without mayhem. Yugoslavia split into shards and became hell on earth. South Africa is a madhouse that can’t keep the lights on. China put the genie back in the bottle. They ran tanks over dissidents in Tiananmen Square in 1989 and remain firmly in power.

I intended to be very far from the internet most of July but God or fate was like “no, I want you to see the sausage made”. For which I’m uh… thankful?