Trumpets [Guest Post]

A Paradigm Shift is needed – Urgently. It cannot be provided to you, you must develop it within your own mind – and you’d better do it quick; or you will lose.

If you are a regular reader of our site (The Last Refuge) you are generally a person who engages in intellectual discussion on daily events and more than likely a root cause thinker. Meaning you are able to grasp events at their cause and not at their consequence. But for some reason, even those who understand big picture dynamics are still comfortable sticking their heads in the sand about “motive”. Most people are still clinging to actual beliefs around a principle of ‘rule of law’ that applies to National Leadership.

You’d better change that thinking quickly – or you’ll be asking ‘what happened’ far too late.

There seems to be a willful blindness on the part of the American people, a chosen refusal to acknowledge the implications of the unAmerican and unConstititional behaviors, actions and outcomes we are being served on a daily basis.

It can no longer be presumed to be a matter of “I can’t see what’s happening” because a whole lot of normal Americans really are clean and articulate.

“I can’t see it” just doesn’t cut it.

Bullsh!t! You can see it, you are just choosing to reconcile the irreconcilable because it is more comforting to ignore the truth of it. You are scared:

• You are scared of being labeled
• You are scared of being belittled
• You are scared of being Alinsky’d.
• You are scared of being targeted.
• You are scared because you have never been here before.
• You are scared of being right.

Just be honest. Avoidance has become your survival mechanism.

It’s more along the lines of “I see what’s happening, but it’s scary and complicated and confusing, and if I admit that I see it, I will become responsible in a way that I am not if I keep pretending I can’t see it or hear it or maybe I don’t understand it.”

Our Republic has become Kitty Genovese screaming in the darkness, being assaulted repeatedly and viciously, while onlookers sitting in the darkness startle onto their feet–some trying to reach for phones or light switches while others try to hush them, accusing them of exaggerated reactions.

The screams reach some homes where the residents look nervously and silently at one another, really hoping that someone else will call the cops, because obviously something really bad is happening out there.

Now, like then, you, like those people in New York, look around and say well someone is going to do something about this usurption of power and unconstitutional action. So you pull the comfy blankies of historical public leadership reference over your head, cover your ears, block out the sights and the sounds, and do nothing.

You don’t even accept the fact a woman, Lady Liberty, our republic, is being repeatedly stabbed, carved up and her flesh torn from her body. She is bleeding on your grass and her bloody hand prints are on your trees and sidewalks. You know it, yet you lie there.

Doing what? Really? If not you,….. WHO? Who is “them”?

Remember the visual illusions on big cards, (Rorschach tests) just black and white splotches that required you to “stare just right”– and when you did, you could see the ink-drawn cow in a snow drift? That’s the one we grew up with–yours might have had palm trees in it or something else. But you stared hard, knowing that eventually you would see a clear picture —ah! There it is! For just a minute, but you saw it there–for just a minute.

How many are sitting in the midst of this implosion still believing that if they stare hard enough at the national mess they will still see a Constitutional government and a Representative Republic?

Well, stare as long as you want. The details of a Constitutional Representative Republic will no longer come into focus because it turns out that the Republic was apparently stitched together with dissolvable thread like the surgeons use.

Why don’t we dare say what is so? Are we a bit afraid that if we give up the willful blindness we will perhaps start screaming and not be able to stop? Do we think we have so little courage? Do we really believe that we have no resources to bring to the battle? Or nothing more to contribute to the turning of the battle?

There are patriots who some might say resemble one of those slightly mad orchestra conductors who keep yelling, “More trumpet! More TRUMPET!” Many of you are such slightly mad orchestra leaders. Don’t be alarmed by some of the strange looks you are getting these days.

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What is the source of this passive willingness that accepts illegal activity behind phrases like “they wouldn’t do that….” when they obviously are doing it?

In 1974, Patty Hearst was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army. She lay in a California closet in her wet and smell for days that turned into weeks. Finally, it made sense in what was left of her 19 year old mind to pick up an M-1 carbine and carry it into a bank to assist the SLA with an armed robbery. Passive willingness, no matter how troubled underneath, is a choice:  there’s something that’s being purchased by the passivity –and something that’s being traded away for it. Transactions are happening.

Why do normal Americans get swept into accepting these somewhat silent transactions that result in their cooperation with those who care nothing for our Constitutional Republic? (Be sure of this–they really don’t mind if we disagree, if we vent, if we vote, even if we organize…as long as they get to keep doing what they are doing. They really don’t mind us. At all. Isn’t that obvious by now?)

But back to the question–why do the silent transactions happen? Perhaps because the alternative to passive willingness is active refusal–and there it is: the price tag for active refusal may actually be quite high–and will often be perceived of as just being too high–and besides that, is an unknown. There’s a deep deception involved with survival instinct that prevents a true comparison from being made between what’s being gained and what’s being lost as judgments are made (often by default) in the midst of confusing and threatening events. Patty Hearst’s M-1 probably bought her a momentary sense of safety in her personal world gone crazy.

Those whose hold on power depends on deception are always able to find an audience of those willing to be deceived. Now the audience of those willing to be deceived is a flexible group in terms of numbers and identities. Even those who have been in that audience for some time may one day walk away from it. What is it that makes folks stay in that audience? What price are they afraid of paying? What deception are they unwilling to let go of?

While we we use the word passive to describe this “willingness to continue in deception,” this is not an experience shaded in peaceful lavenders, mint greens and dappled sunlight. This is the deadly passivity of muscles that no longer fire; tiny electrical charges that no longer leap from one synapse to the next. This is a passivity says, “I won’t begin resisting, because I know that once begun, I must continue. Rather than assert myself and perhaps fail (or get really scared), I will sustain myself where I am trapped. I will muffle my moans so as not to risk exposure and I will call it self-control. Winston Churchill would have called it cowardice but I will call it pragmatic caution.”

It’s desperately necessary for our survival that we become disillusioned–and quickly.

It’s desperately necessary for our survival that we become disillusioned–and quickly.

Think about that word: Dis-illusioned. Having illusions exposed and removing them from the decision-making process. It’s important, because illusions that are defended and protected and argued for, instead of being exposed, will always take us to default decisions that are inherently based on unreality.

……illusions that are defended and protected and argued for, instead of being exposed, will always take us to default decisions that are inherently based on unreality…..

Isaac Newton said that passivity in objects was predictable. Perhaps passivity in troubled humans is predictable as well. He said it this way with regard to objects:

An object that is at rest will stay at rest unless an unbalanced force acts upon it.

So–it appears that we need an unbalanced force to act upon these passively willing objects that are content to remain at rest. MORE TRUMPET, please.

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In I Corinthians 14 the Apostle Paul asks a really sensible question in verse 8 “….if the trumpet makes an uncertain sound, who will prepare for battle?”

WE NEED TRUMPETS

We need lots of trumpets, with soaring sounds that pierce the sky. Trumpets that play “Reveille” to wake more people up. Trumpets that broadcast victories. Trumpets that play “Taps” (when needed) over losses. Trumpets that signal which way to run to the battle. Trumpets that provide cadence and courage.

WE NEED TRUMPETS

Another question posed by Sundance–what is this disconnect, this insanity of continuing to say “they wouldn’t, they couldn’t, they can’t” when they will, they can and they are–in real time–today?

Freedom-loving Germans who chose active resistance against the Third Reich saw the need for it as early as the mid-1930′s. Germany’s patriots (both in and out of uniform) had been actively resisting the darkness for years before her soldiers saw the forests of Poland in 1939. One of those patriots was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, identified as Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy in the subtitle of a biography authored by Eric Metaxas. There were many roles filled by Bonhoeffer. Two of the key ones were being a nonconformist/government-resisting/stagnant-church-poking-in-the-ribs pastor on one hand and an active dissident and saboteur who worked with generals and citizens alike to resist the Nazi machine on the other.

As early as 1935, Bonhoeffer identified a dilemma that marked a cross-over of sorts for many of them. Here was the question it turned on: When did a form of passive resistance become exposed as not actually being resistance?

As a teaching pastor and theologian, he had other pastors looking to him for guidance with regard to how best to frame their “confession of the Gospel” in the presence of Nazism’s co-opting of the work of the churches (the willing churches were put “under the protection of the Third Reich” early on–isn’t that special….). He struggled with his own thoughts and the instinct that drove so many Germans–churched and nonchurched alike–the instinct totake a position without taking action.

Eberhard Bethge, German Protestant theologian and close friend of Bonhoeffer’s wrote this summary of Bonhoeffer’s thoughts:

Bonhoeffer introduced us in 1935 to the problem of what we today call political resistance. The levels of confession and of resistance could longer be kept neatly apart. The escalating persecution of the Jews generated an increasingly intolerable situation, especially for Bonhoeffer himself. We now realized that mere confession, no matter how courageous, inescapably meant complicity with the murderers, even though there would always be new acts of refusing to be co-opted and even though we would preach “Christ alone” Sunday after Sunday. During the whole time the Nazi state never considered it necessary to prohibit such preaching. Why should it?

Thus we were approaching the borderline between confession and resistance; and if we did not cross this border, our confession was going to be no better than cooperation with the criminals. And so it became clear where the problem lay for the Confessing Church: we were resisting by way of confession, but we were not confessing by way of resistance.

Speaking now only of our relationship to the State….are we suffering under the illusion that we can indefinitely resist by way of confession (i.e., “standing for” conservative ideals and Constitutional truths) without being troubled by the need for confessing by way of resisting–to borrow Bonhoeffer’s phrase? If we are, is it time to become dis-illusioned?

Our context is not the same as his was, but I think the question is similar. It’s not inherently a faith issue, although Bonhoeffer experienced it in that context.

Reconcile Your Complacency Against This

My conservative perspectives, my support of what’s left of our Republic and my bleats of dismay at what’s being done to our Constitution in broad daylight are not changing what’s actually happening.

TRUMPETS, Wolverines. TRUMPETS.

Crossposted from The Last Refuge