Our enemies would fund our civil war

A country torn by civil war can't be a power player on the international stage. Think about the countries in the last 50 years that have broken apart in that way. Their struggles might influence global policy and occupy the time of superpowers, but they themselves are not superpowers.

The term superpower was coined to describe the massive influence of the mightiest nuclear-armed nations in the second half of the 20th Century. America was the first, with its atomic bomb. As nuclear weapons technology spread, the Soviet Union became the opposing force. Alliances formed among the lesser nations to gain power by association with one superpower or the other.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States was left as the last remaining superpower. For a brief few years, we could believe that we stood unopposed. Of course the nuclear arsenal still sat in readiness in the remnants of the USSR. They were no longer under a central command, but enough of them were still in Russia's hands to make a nice armageddon. Good thing no one was in  the mood at the time.

Russia reconstituted its power gradually. It was never going to lie there and give up its global ambitions. The ambitions live in the minds of human leaders, but the culture of imperialism -- no matter how re-labeled -- has centuries of heritage there.

China emerged as a power player more gradually. Its role in an actual armed conflict would probably be doggedly defensive rather than as an initial aggressor, but it can't be dismissed. Its leaders would enjoy global power as would any ambitious person. And unambitious people don't seek positions of leadership. Policy is made by dominant people.

If America gives way to its temptation to fight it out internally -- literally, with gunfire and explosions and factional killing -- China and Russia would fund and arm both sides and just sit back. America has conducted itself internationally with more pride than humility since it took its place as a real global power in the 1890s by beating up on Spain. The rest of the world might feel some sorrow at our dissolution, but also a bit of schadenfreude at the toppling of our self-constructed pedestal.

Would American business leaders really let the civil war happen? Civil wars in other countries are profitable. Let the smaller nations go up in flames and down in rubble. Good businessmen will talk about how it's in our national interest to be involved a little bit, but hold back from the wasteful extravagance of either global war or a real armed conflict on American streets. We can send a few thousand troops, and arm the combatants in these endless lesser conflicts as a way to affirm that the human species will never be peaceful and unified, while still keeping the golf courses, yacht clubs, and estates safely distant from the battle zones. But what if they can't maintain control? Lots of people are getting disgusted with the rule of the corporate elite. Who knows for sure how the official military forces might divide? Once an uprising is declared an insurrection, not just a criminal act, US armed forces can be used on home soil. Troops would have to decide where their loyalty lies.

Civil war would be a supremely bad idea. Since when has that ever stopped a determined bunch of people from marching off on a grand campaign? And on a higher level, maybe the destruction of the United States is just the next phase in evolution. It wouldn't be a failure of the principles on which the republic claimed to be founded. Those are universally available to any interested humans. If nations really are obsolete, the obliteration of this one would be merely another chapter in humanity's quarrelsome history. The principles of individual liberty and shared responsibility could still underlie any future regime more generally applied to human well-being across the planet.

I'm not saying that they would. But they could.

We are free to prevent our dissolution by growing up a little and facing the reality of the damage our species has done to the planet and each other. We can choose to start to get along with each other and look more carefully at the interdependence of all life, not just human life or of one sub-category of human life.  I'm not saying that we will. But we should. We can confound our enemies by refusing to destroy ourselves at the same time that we decline to engage in direct hostilities with them. Such a course would depend on an unprecedented level of wisdom. The only other option is to continue our uneasy paranoia for as long as we manage to keep from destroying ourselves outright. Aggressive leaders can always find recruits. Even if a majority of people don't want to be hostile to each other, a minority of motivated aggressors can always force the issue to bloodshed. That then has to be resolved before any progress can resume.

The human hand on the landscape

Thirty years ago, the mountain slope behind my house was covered with mature forest. Mixed hardwood and pine covered the whole little mountain range from end to end. The climb to the nearest summit was an easy bushwhack with little understory. No one seemed to go out there except during deer hunting season. Even then, it was only a few hunters. For almost ten years, I could traverse the entire range to the highest point at the far end without seeing many signs of human activity.

Like most of the eastern United States, this area was pretty well deforested by the late 19th Century. But old rock walls and cairns, and the occasional cellar hole, don't seem intrusive. They did foreshadow the possibility that humans could develop an interest in the land again at any time.

Other parts of the mountain range got logged. Some of the cuts were large and drastic. One cut even came up the far side of the ridge behind my house. That one wasn't a total shave. When it was over, regrowth began. Any cuts provided a bit of open skiing for a couple of years until saplings grew in densely.

The first incursion into the happy playground of my home mountain arrived in 1997, when a neighboring property was sold. The new owner had it logged. The logger was one of those people who could be stupid or could be a criminal or could be a stupid criminal. His first move was to ignore the boundaries of the lot he was supposed to cut, because the terrain was easier and the trees were more valuable lower down. He mowed a large swath across my immediate neighbor's land -- not the one who had hired him -- and was starting in on my oak trees when I caught him. It still took several days to get him to stop and relocate to the parcel he was supposed to be logging. Then he did a rather ugly job, driving his skidder right up to my property line to leave his mark.  But then he was gone, and the open area made an interesting place to practice telemark turns on an easy slope. The landowner never went out on the land. This continued through subsequent owners as well. I poked around out there and never saw anyone I hadn't brought with me.

At the start of the 21st Century, the timber industry began to work on my end of the mountain. A couple of large tracts abut each other, and each property owner at some point decided to harvest some trees. They were large cuts, but not large clearings. I'm always disturbed by motors and machinery in wild land, but when the cutting ended it was not followed by more motorized activity. I resumed my bushwhack visits, remaining unseen as much as possible, and leaving no trace.

The owners of a cabin in a hollow decided to replace it with a chalet on a knoll, but it is amazingly well concealed. During its construction I literally almost walked into the wall of it, covered in gray Tyvek, as I traversed the slope in a zigzag course of exploration. They had seldom been around. I'd grown accustomed to having the freedom of the hill. After they built their bigger house, I retreated. I only end up over there by accident, usually when descending in snow. The structure is still quite invisible. I thank them for that. There was still plenty of mountain left to play on.

Large cuts began to occur more frequently on what had been reassuringly covered with trees. Sometimes I would see that someone with a motorized vehicle had made one scouting foray and found it uninteresting. I know that in a human-controlled world everything has to earn its keep monetarily. Every tree is on borrowed time. Every undisturbed landscape has to pass an audit to show that it has more economic value in its natural state.

Most recently, the big parcel more or less directly uphill from me was drastically cut. The owner had died and his widow had sold the land to a logger and developer. The cut went on for months, including the operation of a large chipper at the landing on the road frontage, operating for six or eight hours a day. This is how it is when you have a home in timber country. Heavy machinery churned the mountainside. I finally went out to look at it at the first snowfall, when the action had shifted further away from my end of the lot. It was startling. Further exploration through the winter confirmed that the cleared area was huge compared to anything that had preceded it. I knew it would be a beacon to people who can't do anything without a motorized vehicle. The blaze of the snowfield would attract "sledders." The wide open spaces would attract wheeled vehicles. And so it was. Late-season surveys showed knobby tire tracks up the deeply gashed skidder swaths. Most recently, I had heard a motor vehicle cruising up there in the quiet of evening, its low mutter coming through with the annoying persistence of a dog licking its private parts next to your bed at 3 a.m. I fear that this is the total end of the peaceful escapes I once enjoyed up there. The neighbors with the chalet have been patrolling their land on a tracked vehicle, and now the other piece has become a playground for polluters as well.

The motorists will say all the usual things: "It's just me! I'm not hurting anything. I'm just having fun."

Brock Turner was just having fun. Lynch mobs were just having fun. The Mongol Horde was just having fun.

Don't try to create a false equivalency between my footsteps and ski tracks, and someone else's carbon footprint, noise pollution, and tire gouges on a landscape already slashed and gashed by the heavy hand of industrial timber removal. There are cuts and there are cuts. There's good management and there's fast work that maximizes profit at the cost of things like drainage and topsoil. I've seen the aftermath of every cut out there since 1989, and the latest is by far the worst. The fact that it attracted motor vehicles like flies to a corpse is an added strike against it.

Yesterday I went to have a look because the persistent motor noises indicated regular use, not just a random foray. I found a bear baiting station with ATV tracks indicating that I have probably heard the baiter coming and going. The bait is a disgusting mass of old doughnuts, mashed into the bottom of a large plastic barrel. Because bait season ended two days ago in this wildlife management unit, it was no longer supposed to be there. Because the land is owned by a profit-driven company that cares nothing for it ecologically, I don't know if the baiter even sought the written permission required by the state. There is nothing to connect the bait station to an identifiable individual.

How did people ever kill bears before the invention of doughnut shops?

All this activity pretty well kills the place for me. I don't want to run into any motorheads when I'm out there. The sound of even a quiet motor carries way too well, grating on my nerves in my own back yard, let alone in closer proximity. I don't want them to see me, and I don't want to see them.

Hunters might claim that they depend on the meat and the sale of hides. The meat argument doesn't hold up to cost analysis when you figure out what they had to invest in guns, ammunition, dogs, dog food, ATVs, registration, fuel, and other expenses related to the modern hunt. Fashion yourself a spear out of a sapling, with a stone point on it, and then we'll talk about real cost savings compared to just buying some meat at the store. Then there's the "wildlife management" angle. It's been people versus nature from the beginning of time, or at least from the time at which humans evolved enough to separate themselves from nature. We control the balance by taking what we want and killing what we have to. We have believed that we could figure out how to maintain that balance by means that please us. These have to be adjusted as research indicates that the system isn't working to our long-term advantage. We're too slowly acknowledging that the overall natural mechanism that supports all life depends on leaving quite a bit of it alone. This would reduce the number of house lots that land pimps can profit from, and create by default a lot of undisturbed habitat in which the creatures that don't answer to us can do their thing. It's not just some animal rights story. It's an understanding of the complex relationships of all the parts. Any animals accidentally left alone are just collateral damage to the profit-driven enterprises that have to slow their pace of destruction.

Whoever builds a house up there will need to understand that the forest used to support all kinds of life. You can clear the vegetation and replace it with what pleases you, and eradicate the inconvenient animals, but that will have its price.

Rage against the dying of the light

My father is dying. He's not going in any immediate way, but he is 92, and his poor life choices are catching up with him. He is that bizarre anomaly, a healthy fat man. He's not as healthy as he would have been if he had prevented himself from getting fat, but he's not your stereotypical mess of clogged arteries. He could go for at least several more years. And they're already not fun years. He knows too well what is happening to him, and how he made it worse.

His parents both lived well up into their nineties. But when his mother died in the mid 1980s, she had been a vegetable from an acquired -- not genetic -- debilitating illness since the late 1940s. His father was somewhere between 96 and 98 when he died, blind and infirm, in veterans' home in Indiana. My father knew he had the potential to live a long time, if his job or some other intervening catastrophe didn't take him out first.

A diligent survivor, he had dipped briefly into poverty and uncertainty after the disintegration of his family around 1943. He enlisted in the Coast Guard in 1944 after flunking out of MIT. He qualified for the Coast Guard Academy, and emerged as an officer in 1951. He served with distinction until his retirement in 1979. He survived storms at sea, and the Arctic night, and his propensity to drive long distances without stopping. He has even survived a classic American diet of meat and starch. He quit smoking in time to avoid cancer and heart disease. In an alternate universe, he kept smoking and survived anyway. We'll never know. But he has lost a lot in the last few years, making his present existence pretty miserable.

He's a fighter, literally. Although sailing was his passion, he also boxed in college. He learned how to make his characteristics work for him against fighters who were larger and faster. Manly anger was a power source. He's far from a one-dimensional character, but that inner fire was his emergency battery. A man of reason, he would tap into a furnace of accumulated rage when he needed to make a special physical effort.

The inner fire and his oddly durable genetics allowed him to get away with very haphazard exercise all the way to his eighties. You might think that's pretty good, but when it's no longer good enough the endgame isn't pretty. His fat is a hard, firm fat. He cannot bend to tie his shoes. He can't even pull on his socks. Crippled with pain from a degenerated hip, he got himself a new one just a couple of years ago, and has recovered pretty well, but he still resorts to a walker for a lot of maneuvers in his home, which can be disastrously awkward when he has a digestive emergency occasioned by the years of poor diet.

To stave off the macular degeneration that blinded his father, he gets a hypodermic needle in his eyeballs every couple of weeks. Sometimes he goes a month. An avid reader, he now finds it extremely cumbersome, because the degeneration was not caught quickly enough to preserve perfect acuity.

His tendency to default to a chair, to reject walking and jogging because he didn't want to look funny out there, is calling in its debt.

Contrast this to my mother's father. Longevity also runs on my mother's side. An optometrist in private practice until he was in his early eighties, Earl made a point to take a walk every day. As a younger man he had been a vigorous tennis player. He was always lean, aided perhaps by some food allergies that kept him from pigging out, but also by a work ethic that included conscious physicality. His mind grew more vague as he went through his last decade. I carried on a correspondence with him as long as I could, but my last letter to him was answered by my uncle, explaining that Earl couldn't continue the exchange. My grandfather's last act was to get up from his seat in the living room and walk to the bedroom, where he dropped dead from a stroke at age 98. I know from our late communications that he did not like the dimming of his mind. As he went into that tunnel, he knew he was going into it. It wasn't classic dementia as such, but he had taken pride in his intellect and was sad to see his sharpness fade. He was heard to long for death quite a while before he reached it. But at least he could tie his shoes.

My father is no fan of either elderly decrepitude or death. He adopted a more physical lifestyle just a few years ago, but it still wasn't a full-bore campaign of daily walks. The phrase "too little, too late" springs to mind. He still defaulted to his chair in front of the television, where he trolled through the full array of news programs, and processed what he saw through a mind trained by decades of administration and policy analysis in Washington. His body fits most naturally into the shape of an armchair, and yet he loathes the stiffness and slow shuffle of his gait when he rises from it. This is what happens when you know better, but you don't do better. He rages against the dying of the light, but his body cannot function solely on that emotional fire. He did not build the machine to carry out his will. He dwelt too much in the mind, aided by a body that produced surprising results for too long, lulling him into a sense that it would always be thus.

The young cadet went aloft in square riggers, and climbed the forestay of one of them hand over hand, just to show that he could. The officer advancing up the chain of command retreated to the dignity becoming his rank, and the less physical duties required of him. He complained of his expanding waistline for years. After he retired from the Coast Guard he had complete control over his time, but spent none of it trying to recapture any of his youthful physicality. As he advanced through middle age, he excused his portly physique by saying that the men in his family all aged that way. He viewed it as inevitable. Genetics are not like a box of chocolates. If you know the traits of your lineage, you have a pretty good idea what you're going to get. But you don't have to merely ride that train to the last stop, taking whatever your DNA dishes out. Start raging early, and don't stop.

A stupid tee shirt

Yesterday, a customer came into the shop wearing a tee shirt that said, "Ted Kennedy's car has killed more people than my gun."

The fact that I was trying not to bust out laughing at this idiot made me appear cheerful, which gave the impression of top notch customer relations.

First of all, the guy was obviously not even born yet when the Chappaquiddick incident occurred. Second, Ted Kennedy has been dead for ten years, and is hardly a factor in the current political scene. But the nice thing about kicking a corpse is that you know it can't hit back.

Then there's the matter of equating the lethal potential of a car -- a transportation device usually only lethal by accident -- with a gun, whose sole purpose is to cause injury or death. What do you mean your gun has never killed anyone? Have you had no opportunity to be a good armed citizen, or are you just a lousy shot? Did you serve in the military in any of our recent wars in Afghanistan or Iraq? If so, and you haven't killed any enemies, the taxpayers wasted our money on you, didn't we?

The purpose of such slogans on tee shirts is purely inflammatory. Inflammatory statements can still convey larger truths. But this one was just stupid. At least it wasn't a tattoo. A tee shirt wears out or can be thrown in the rag bin.

We don't live in a single-issue world

As any election approaches, I get polling emails asking me to list my priorities for the country. What is most important to me? If I had to pick one or two things, what would they be?

Interesting intellectual exercise, but we don't live in a one-issue world.

Sometimes the poll will ask me to rank a long list of issues in numerical order from most important to least important. This is supposed to provide more detail and nuance, but that's another illusion. I never see a list that I can comfortably organize that way.

It's become a cliche that "everything is connected," but everything is connected. We can't solve one problem at a time. We can't half-solve a problem and call it good enough. Numerous philosophies have tried to blunt the human predilection for selfishness and violence. Not one of them has yet found the balance between permissible self interest and complete submission to the group. The philosophies read well. The basic principles usually include something like "do unto others as you would have them do unto you." But what if you're a masochist?

The destruction of our environment is not just an aesthetic question. It's become a matter of survival. But we can be personally odious in a pristine environment. We can be greedy, racist, misogynist, bigoted assholes who shoot each other over a petty insult. We can have a profit-driven system of health care services designed to enrich the management and stockholders of a few corporations. So maybe we solve the environmental threat to basic survival and still kill each other off in plenty of other ways. We can produce plenty of carcinogenic chemicals in carefully isolated areas and still maintain just enough natural environment to keep the planet's life support system basically functional. Sound good to you?

All human conflict comes back to well-documented items on the naughty list. We can chip away at those behaviors while the atmosphere rapidly becomes toxic with the untreated exhaust gases of industrial society. Maybe we will enjoy one glorious moment of global unity just before we asphyxiate.

It all seems overwhelming if you look at it all at once, but we've avoided looking at it at all for so long that we can't look away any longer. Immigration and refugee displacement is a problem because the places they live have been made uninhabitable by human policy decisions. Humans decided to make messes that drive other humans to seek safety elsewhere. Humans implement the policies. Humans justify their indifference and hostility to each other just to get from one day to the next.

Political reality is not reality. An elected official has to get into office by appealing to enough voters to get elected, and then fulfill the duties of office under a different set of pressures from ordinary citizens and from information that might not have been available to them before. Sometimes they just lie. Sometimes they are forced to change a position because circumstances change. Government is where the fantasy life of voters comes up against the thorny tangle of real problems. What gets a person elected and re-elected might nurture the fantasy life while letting the tangle grow out of control.

Approaching legal murder

At what point in human evolution did it become a crime to kill someone who annoys you? We cannot know. We can only observe that in other species the pros and cons of killing are weighed on a purely practical basis.

Carnivorous animals choose prey that is likely to go down easily. They're looking for a good meal, not a good fight. Animals that battle for breeding dominance might not kill each other outright, but might leave both winners and losers too drained to make it through the winter. Sometimes, fatal injuries occur in the ritualistic confrontations as well. There seems to be no social stigma in the herd. It's just how their lives work.

Humans are more complicated than the more specialized species. We can exhibit aspects of every other life form from algae on up. No one has adequately catalogued the infinite variety. This makes it hard to write a good rule book. Even the concept of a rule book is unnatural. We have evolved some widespread general principles, which usually include a disapproving view of murder. But in the back of most minds, and much nearer the front of some remains the memory that at one time you could be more impulsively violent and come out better rather than worse for it, if you won the confrontation.

The gunslinger libertarian view of humanity holds that the only way to keep people in line is with the threat of violent retribution. An aggressor must be supported, if the cause is worthy, or opposed by force. In a world where everything is either a metaphor for war or an actual war, nothing prospers for very long, but anything that wins has earned its place at the top -- however brief -- by superior force. Eat the best food. Claim all the breeding females. The nostalgia runs so deep that it is prehistoric.

As civilization breaks down under all of the accumulating pressures, our advanced ability to rationalize and fantasize teams up with primitive instinct. We haven't quite reached the point where you can kill someone and go on about your day without further interruption, but tempers seem to be growing shorter. How often do you find yourself wondering whether you should speak up about something you see, because the person you see doing it might just pull a gun on you?

"Hey! Pick up your trash!"

Blam blam blam blam!

Authoritarians also believe that when all else fails, unruly citizens should be held down by force. There's less freelance murder, but the regime's scapegoats are fair game. And there are lots of job opportunities in government service for loyal violent people with no conscience. Under an authoritarian regime, the preliminaries to violence will be repressive laws guaranteed to irritate someone sooner or later. And then it's time put down the uprising, whether that's a single, loud dissenting voice, or a gathering of aggrieved citizens in public protest.

So far, there are only a few ways to get away with murder. Killing a bicyclist on the road is practically a freebie. Pedestrians are almost as easy. On a lonely road, just hit and run. In the presence of witnesses, you must stop and express remorse to avoid facing legal action. Make it look good! Otherwise, your legal defense might cost you a few thousand dollars and a couple of missed days at work.

In states with "stand your ground" laws, the person who shoots most accurately generally gets to tell the story. Your odds are much better running over a cyclist, because the use of a gun is more likely to put you in front of a jury. Not only that, most road users are just as happy to have one less cyclist in the way. A lot of people will be sympathetic to the poor motorist who suffered the trauma of snuffing out a reckless idiot who insisted on wobbling around on two wheels among the big, dangerous vehicles.

What will you do when the ethnic cleansing starts?

Forces are gathering in this country that are eager to begin gunning down the people they don't like, randomly and at will. Their numbers are still small. The actual trigger pullers will always be a small percentage of the group. But they are supported by a much larger population of half-assed, wimpy bigots who would be happy to see the world made safe for their kind. They just don't have the guts to come right out and lead the charge. Maybe some of them would join in once the carnage gained momentum. Others would just run out and kick a corpse a few times to feel the emotional rush with absolutely no risk to themselves.

Looking at history, after the extermination of all of their enemies and inferiors, the remaining homogenized population will romanticize them and role-play, like a sports team with a native American mascot, or white performers made up as black, or Asian. Perhaps a few token populations of the other races will be kept alive in controllable communities.

There are conservative people who are not "Aryan." When they have helped the white supremacists to achieve dominance, will they be allowed to keep their holdings, or will they be stripped of wealth and thrown in the camps with the other losers? Do they think that they can avoid that?

There are about 300 million firearms in the United States. Of those, approximately 5 to 10 million are assault-style rifles. How many do you own? Three hundred million is just about enough to arm every person in the country with a gun. The high figure of 10 million combat-inspired weapons is still a pretty small fraction. But when you figure that the 300 million figure includes esoteric target-shooting weapons, single and two-shot guns, tiny handguns, and some cheap stuff just as likely to blow up in your hand as send a bullet at a bad guy, a lot of us will be undergunned in a firefight.

We peaceniks don't want a firefight at all, of course. A few of us are so committed to nonviolence that we would let ourselves be slaughtered rather than become combative. A somewhat larger percentage believes that they could be that calm, but would definitely hide behind something for as long as they could. In a larger ring around this stand the reluctant warriors who would resist force with force if they had to. The question is, resist with what?

The advocates for gun control want background checks. This is an excellent idea. We want to filter out people with documented tendencies to violence. But the current administration in Washington, and the governments in many states, clearly want a certain demographic to be armed and ready to do violence on their behalf. It can't be an official policy, but if you look at trends in law enforcement, and at the pervasiveness of white privilege in all things, you can sketch in how it might develop from here. The people who insist most strongly on being armed are the ones most likely to be useful to a wealthy, racist state. And the wealthy, racist state doesn't even have to pay them and put them in matching uniforms. The "well-ordered militia" is perfectly happy to act on their own. As long as no one treads on them in a way that they can actually understand, they'll do the wet work for free, just for the pleasure of it. Governments will drag their feet on background checks until the shit is about to hit the fan. Then they will enact them. But they won't be filtering out the abusers, the bigots, the borderline mentally ill control freaks. They'll be filtering for the reluctant warriors for peace. They'll look at political leanings, personal and published writings, any hint that you might stand in the way of what they call progress.

I have never wanted to die from a gunshot. As a normal male in a culture shaped by testosterone, I have imagined putting a few slugs into someone who might "have it coming," but it only took a little more thought to realize how that might apply to me. And it isn't just cowardice to say that perhaps blowing each other away is not the best way to solve a long-term conflict of belief systems. It's an emergency action. I certainly don't want to give any satisfaction to a punk with a bumper sticker that says "Visualize no liberals," by letting him put one through my forehead, either execution-style or as a sniper. But I would still rather that he wised up, rather than have me gun him down.

They've got us by the paradox when we say that no one should be killed for their beliefs, and then they go start killing people for their beliefs, forcing us to kill them back. We are then killing them for their beliefs. And if we seek them out and kill them beforehand because we knew that they were about to kill us, we've hopped right over the line and played by their rules.

So what do you do when the genocide starts? What do you do when a killing madness finally erupts in the small but significant number of people who want it to be that way? The question is especially acute if you don't happen to have a soft, fuzzy belief in a loving god smoothing the upholstery on a radiant heavenly couch for you to relax on after your martyrdom. There are atheists in foxholes, just as their are gay, lesbian, and transgender members of the armed forces. Some belief in a better future makes the idea of personal sacrifice palatable. Unfortunately, history has shown that every bloodbath has only brought partial and temporary relief from the forces of darkness. Sometimes it hasn't even brought that. So perhaps one accepts the martyr's death because there's nothing worth sticking around for anyway. Say a sad farewell to beauty, pleasure, joy, and love, because darkness will always force itself on you and make you kill or die.

If you plan to put up a fight, you might do well to arm yourself now, while it's easy, get trained, practice, and stockpile ammunition so that you can give as good as you get in the hail of gunfire. Train as well with hand weapons and with no weapons. Become as much of a super soldier as possible, while still doing whatever else you might have preferred to do with your life. Or start thinking differently, and talking relentlessly about the choice being forced on us now, and in other countries where the dark side has risen again.

We may not be able to stop the ethnic cleansers from starting a few massacres, but we can at least put governments in place that will recognize it for what it is and prosecute it. We can take the high ground and make the bigots scale it. We can demand that government be for all the people. Like it or not, we're all equipped with a racial identity. We're born with physical characteristics that other people react to. We have a limited ability to control the reactions of others, but we can control our own. That's why any durable change has to come from within individuals, one at a time. It may never work. But it definitely won't if we don't keep the idea alive that it should.