History comes, whether or not you want it

Most people want to live quiet lives Not quiet lives of desperation, but quiet lives full of love and laughter and peace. They want to find work which engages them, friends who support them, lovers who make them more than they are. They want to know that when they wake up in the morning they can go to work, have lunch, go about their daily business.

What most people don't want is to live in the middle of world-historical events. They don't want to face chaos and violence. They don't want to be unsure of what the next day will bring. They don't want to wonder if the world they knew in the Beforetime will ever be re-established. Think Syria. Think Venezuela. Think Weimar Germany.

We here in the United States may not be facing riots. We're not facing an oppressive government in the streets, like the protesters in Hong Kong. But make no mistake: We are at an inflection point in the history of this Republic.

I posted a series of tweets concerning the deranged letter Donald Trump sent to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi yesterday. One of my followers had this to say:

I hope you are right. We are either getting close to the end of this awful nonsense or the beginning of an extremely long period of awful nonsense.

— Matthew Hubbard (@ConfidenceOfVic) December 18, 2019

Will we go back to the Beforetime? Or will we be plunged into some greater horror, more redolent of failed states?

I posit that neither will happen.

The time before 2016 is gone. We were attacked by a foreign power using subterfuge and malice, and the attack was successful. The attack laid bare our weakness as an open, democratic republic. The attack took advantage of the divisions which were barely concealed in our society, bringing them to the fore, weaponizing them, using them to humble us.

It's a common trope that when some tragedy befalls this nation, we "lose our innocence". I hate that phrasing, because a country which enslaved a group human beings and committed genocide against another group of human beings can never claim to have been "innocent".

But in one thing we were innocent. We had a belief that we were all Americans. That we would band together when attacked. We did after 9/11.

However, what 2016 revealed is that we are two Americas. One which still believes in republican democracy, in the idea that a free people are a strong people. And then another America which fears that freedom, which longs for a strongman to set things to rights, to lower an iron fist on those who threaten their diminishing fortunes. And that America is perfectly fine with aid from a foreign enemy. To them, he is merely aiding in keeping them where they have always thought they should have been.

The Beforetime is gone. Although they're the minority, the nihilists who would destroy our values for temporary power will be a present danger. They're dying off and not being replaced in the same numbers, but they will always be a threat to our freedoms.

But because we realize this now, because we, the majority, have no illusions about what many of our neighbors are like, neither will we descend into brute anarchy.

To be forewarned is to be forearmed. No more dewy-eyed pabulum about how we are all one nation. We aren't one nation. We're a majority and a minority, and the minority wishes to destroy the majority. It wishes to exercise power of the few against the many. And the many aren't going to allow that to happen.

We're not Syria. We're not Afghanistan. That nihilistic minority failed to realize that the habits of freedom and liberty are ingrained deeply in us. That our majority are the true patriots, because we have imbibed the creeds of our American mythology. We believe them, and we've now discovered that they're worth fighting for. They fight out of fear. We fight out of hope. They wish to suppress. We wish to uplift.

When Donald Trump is impeached this evening, it will be because of the voice of an enraged people apoplexed that they're being put through this by a two-bit conman from Jamaica, Queens. Incensed beyond endurance that people who are not fit to shine the shoes of those who have fought and bled for this imperfect but perfecting experiment now strive to destroy centuries of self-government. We are angered, we are provoked, and we will have justice.

The Beforetime is gone. We will replace it with something wiser, aware of the limitations of human frailty.

UPDATE
You can follow the proceedings via this livestream.