Opinion/Editorial
STARING INTO THE ABYSS…
The expression is old as the hills: “If you stare into the abyss long enough, the abyss stares back at you.” What does that expression mean? Nietzsche, the great philosopher, penned that quote in a passage from his works. “He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.” As this pertains to our times and our troubles, those now being visited and those building on the horizon like storm clouds headed our way. There are monsters about these days, and they have been given positions of great power. That they are acting like monsters possessing such powers is coming as a shock to the overall populations of the world’s countries and, in particular and marginally, to the very group of humans that gave these monsters power.
It was hoped that these monsters would act like maggots in a wound, eating the dead flesh while cleaning the wound, but these monsters are more like meat-eating dinosaurs of the very oldest of planetary time. They thrived, eating all over animal life around them for millions of years until it took an act of God Himself to send an asteroid sufficient in size to kill these monsters off and yet allow the smaller ‘prey’ life forms to multiply and prosper. Yes, the human species is the penultimate resulting reward and now more powerful than even those dinosaurs of old. One must exercise great care not to fall into the emotional contagion and trap of acting like a monster to rid the planet once again of such monsters. Given that the Lord of all does not send down another asteroid to destroy these new monsters it becomes endemic and requires that those who suffer take the matter into their counsel and potentially in their own hands, but this cannot be done by acting like the very monsters they might seek to clear the planet of.
In another applicable expression, “these are the times that try men’s souls,” written when the word ‘men’ was interpreted as including women, these are always the times that try men’s souls, but in different ways and to different effects. The United States President, the United States Vice President, the United States Congressional Speaker of the House, the United States Senate Pro Team and one private citizen (once the richest man in the world) have all, through monster behavior and the use of the spoken and written word, made themselves considered to monsters by a solid majority of the population. Their combined behavior might call for their removal in mass but in so doing would not the ‘abyss’ written about in some depth and detail, not bring about only more of the same and then indict those who took these leaders out to become exactly what it is they so came to see as a world evil that had to be removed at any cost.
As great swaths of the public lose their lands, rights, benefits, medical care, and even freedoms of all kinds, what is to be done about the developing situation? The solution is not one of physical violence. Yes, eliminating those leaders would require that succession rules be applied and possibly, although not necessarily, other men would replace them but that’s an abyss looking back at us kind of solution. No, in the ‘olden days’ before the United States was ever formed, the ultimate punishment and ridding of the social order was not imprisonment nor execution of any kind. It was banishment. Not even necessarily a physical banishment.
The tribes would simply turn their backs on the kind of behavior being exhibited by America’s current leadership of men and women. The population begins to at first slowly and then with ever-gathering speed, fails to follow orders, refuses to perform or associate with them and then fails to include them in any socially acceptable behavior that occurs everywhere around them. Many countries are responding to the current punishing and restrictive tariffs being enacted not by enacting tariffs of their own but by completely refusing to either buy American products or sell their own to this country. A form of banishment is being selected and applied. The real question that the citizenry must ask itself very seriously and with total attention is about staring into that legendary abyss and making certain that it is not staring into a mirror.
