Nothing to declare

I must ask the reader's indulgence if days go by before I imagine I might have something worth saying in this space.

This isn't "writer's block" (whatever that may be); more like existential dread, a hollowness inside. We have collectively entered terra incognita, sailed off the edge. Heere there bee monstyres.

Lawrence Auster chided me a little for writing that the republic is "torn and bleeding." No, he said, 

I disagree that it’s only torn and bleeding. In my view, it is gone and is not coming back (which I began saying a year ago). A country that accepts open homosexuality in the military, homosexual “marriage,” federal dictatorial control over health care insurance (e.g. the contraceptive mandate), a government that lawlessly topples a foreign government, kills its leader who was no threat to us, and replaces him by our mortal enemies, a government that appropriates the wealth of the orderly and productive part of the population in order to sustain and empower an alien and resentful population of parasites whose problems it blames on the orderly and productive; and, finally, a country in which a growing half of the population will never vote for a political party even half-heartedly opposing these things, is no longer the republic that was bequeathed to us by the founders.

Lawrence might be exactly right. Maybe I was doing exactly what I counseled against, taking refuge in denial, unwilling to recognize the snapping of the cord that, however frayed, seemed until last Tuesday to bind us to the vision of a constitutional republic with the national government's powers ring fenced.

I've read a lot of commentary by the Resistance in the past few days and see that many people have feelings similar to mine -- but that's a cold comfort. The impression is that lots of us are stunned, almost in the literal sense of that abused word. We have taken a knockout punch.

Again and again, commenters convey the shocked recognition of something worse than a disappointing election result. It's as if a disease that has ravished the world community for over a century, but to which we have been largely immune, has entered the household. The contagion of statism is in our national bloodstream. The country that believed fundamentally in the individual and voluntary associations of individuals has ceded the locus of control to Washington bosses.

New tactics for Resistance are already being discussed. Far be it from me to discourage anyone even further, but the first step is to fully admit to ourselves that the USA is now a country like most others, where government at every level -- federal, state, and local; executive, legislative, bureaucratic, and perhaps above all judicial -- tells us how to act, what to do, the limits to what we can say, even what we must buy (under Obamacare).

The old tactics no longer matter. Don't lose your time writing your congressman. Perhaps even demonstrations are meaningless.

What to do, then?

I don't know.

While I'm trying to get a grip, I remind myself that most people in this world live under governments of varying degrees of badness and life goes on. So it has been throughout history, and even during long bleak stretches of time, there have also been renaissances of the arts, sciences, and human achievement.

For me, there is consolation in remembering that politics, while inescapable, is not the alpha and omega of existence. The spiritual life can be -- has been -- practiced under the most difficult, even extreme, conditions. We are not here by accident, the mere product of material forces. As far as I'm concerned, we're here to lift our consciousness toward the ineffable perfection that our gross senses hide from us. Even when lost to ourselves, we are not lost to God.