That the country is split would be something of an understatement. No longer is it just a few issues here and there. This modern age has driven a wedge so far between citizens that being “middle of the road” has become about as uncommon as seeing a unicorn.
The problem is that groups of Americans have made it clear that you can’t be uninvolved or take a central stance. You must be with them or against them, and if you’re against them, you’ll suffer consequences of some kind. This would be laughable by itself, but these very same people can be found in our mainstream media. This breeds issues of its own.
Tack onto that the COVID-19 pandemic, which effectively became the authoritarian’s best friend. Through the guise of “staying safe,” leftist politicians donned figurative crowns and began announcing draconian rules on the populace, all the while citing cherry-picked “science” that always lent to the excuse to increase power, never reduce it.
But we weren’t surprised to find authoritarians in our midst, even less surprised to find them in offices of power. Authoritarians are attracted to these seats, and sometimes, the population is just coerced and fooled enough to vote them in. It’s a tale as old as time.
What really bothers me, and likely you, is that these authoritarians and their draconian rules were applauded. “Safety” became a weapon to enforce their rules, make arrests, or even harass dissenters. These dissenters could be anyone who posed an inconvenient presence to the authoritarians. There were those who argued about the cherry-picked science, provided alternative ideas, or even brought up the very valid point that freedoms must be observed.
Now we have another threat of lockdowns coming our way with the prematurely called “president-elect” Joe Biden claiming he’ll institute a national mask mandate, a power he does not have.
And people are just kind of okay with this. Despite the fact that lockdowns do more harm than good, many have rolled over and accepted the idea that ineffective measures we’ve been taking for months will be effective this time. They join in with the authoritarians in tamping down any resistance to this idea. They mock others, throw around cherry-picked data, and proceed to make the authoritarians and their ineffective measures seem like the adults in the room.
The very sad part is that many on the Right have joined this authoritarian crowd because they bought into the “safety” lie.
The interesting part is that this situation has boiled us down to two very different groups.
The first group wants to be left alone and, what’s more, wants to leave alone. The live and let live crowd. It’s heard the news, read the numbers, seen the patterns, understands the risks, and would still rather be left to decide for themselves if they would undertake the risk of contracting the virus.
The other is content to be told what to do and would assist in telling others what to do on the former’s behalf. It’s the “do as I say or else” crowd. They use the idea of “safety” as an open doorway to despotism.
These two groups are wholly incompatible.
I worry that in the near future, the authoritarians will only buckle down on their authoritarianism. They’ll pull out every excuse under the sun to increase their power, and the media will do whatever it takes to justify it. Simultaneously, they’ll continue to paint any opposition to it as some form of evil, be it selfishness, hatred, etc.
It wasn’t that long ago that I wrote an article telling you all that we are, in fact, already in a civil war and that many of us just didn’t know it yet. As both groups trend apart and become more defiant of each other’s stances, I worry that things will get far worse before they get better.
The question is, who will they get better for?
