To support and defend, the oath you took, meant demanding yourself, your peers, your superiors and others in the government you held office in, meet the higher standard of public service. It's not an either or thing, that would have been you meeting the standard you agreed to when you entered federal public office.
Getting good OPRs and pleasing your boss wasn't enough. Flying a tight ILS approach wasn't enough.
You are correct that it's too late and that ship has sailed. That has been obvious for some time now. When the digital water cooler you moderated saw our rights as an annoyance and evidence of tin foil thinking and when your peers celebrated their tools of the trade being used to murder Americans in violation of the Fifth Amendment, it should have been clear. So also when they joked about fuse settings for munitions to drop on Occupy protestors or when they lashed out at Edward Snowden for trying to get the government to meet standards. Your peers have long demonstrated that they were unfit for public office and that was the culture that was accepted and celebrated.
And now we are seeing the results of that lack of character combined with a massive disparity in technology between those inside the walls, and the peasants outside them. Almost comically, some of your peers don't yet realize which side of the wall they're actually on. Supporting our Constitution, bearing true faith and allegiance to it, is a selfish act as much as the mark of a professional public servant. A DD214 makes poor body armor when a tyrannical government, filled with the current crop of fascist thugs disgracing their uniforms, is given an order by the degenerate culture you've identified as operating the levers of power. The Green Beret from Idaho could have told you that, so could any number of J6 protestors currently rotting in prison cells for exercising their First Amendment rights.
It is too late. It will get so much worse. And so it goes.
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Hey, Rick. Happy New Year. Seems like we're embarking on the most consequential year of our lives.
ReplyDeleteI often reflect on how I thought and felt when I joined. I was wholly inspired. I thought I was an integral part of a mechanism that was safeguarding the highest achievement in human history. I was unable to conceive that threats from the inside could be greater than those outside. I had chosen a path, invested near everything in it on the basis of trust, and the idea it could be corrupted would have been an impossible and insulting idea, had I even entertained it.
I once told the story of the DoD Undersecretary of Defense, and that’s when I first felt there may be something really wrong, but I still didn’t fully understand what, so I didn’t think about it. But the evidence began to accumulate, became intrusive and unavoidable. Again, I didn’t want to abandon my worldview, so I challenged all the alternates believing only the truth could hold up under scrutiny. One of my eventual mistakes was often confusing my desire to be right with the desire to find the truth, bad as it was.
I don’t remember when it was, but I began having some contrarian opinions and was soundly lambasted for them on the forum. I specifically remember arguing for the wikileaks issue, and vaguely remember it being a bit of a turning point. It was a delicate operation to try and challenge opinions and viewpoints without completely torpedoing your reputation and invalidating your future contributions, and I’ve never been successful at that. My mind was changing, and at some point I came to regret some of my previous posts and positions. At the same time, I was feeling an increasing contempt for the forum. I was an Admin, but I don’t specifically remember silencing or censoring anyone for their views, as I felt I could get more satisfaction from a battle of words. But I didn’t want to be an Admin anymore, so I gave mod privileges to a whole slew of folks I thought were right-minded, deleted all my individual posts, and then batch-deleted all the threads I had started, as I felt I owned them. I didn’t realize how many I had created and I inadvertently wiped out a large part of the forum. LOL. Oh well. I still engage, but I’m not invested in it. You’ve correctly identified the clowns: pawnman, nsplayer, and the others. I don’t care about them. I’ll occasionally engage with them because it allows me to make a point and direct my inflammatory language at a single person of no consequence, but knowing others are reading it without taking the personal affront is the idea.
Makes sense. There is no convincing somebody like nsplyr or pawnman. But combating their propaganda for lurkers is at least something.
DeleteIt has been somewhat heartening to see the increase in American voices on that forum since the days when you were a rare voice. But, of course, people finally pointing out the dangers of the Third Reich is far less useful once already on the train...