I sat down to write an essay about President Trump's energetic rally in Georgia before a massive crowd of ebullient patriots.  I wanted to discuss the reasons why this American leader has set himself apart from all others.  I wanted to bolster his rallying cry that "we're going to take back our country from these lunatics."  I thought I might entitle my final product "The Resplendent Donald Trump," because he has shone a light on the struggles and opportunities facing Americans today better than any public figure in decades.  

I put that essay aside, however, when I couldn't get past a recurring theme showing up in the writings and commentaries I read daily.  That theme is unmistakable despair.  It seems that bad news has piled up so steadily that it is becoming harder and harder to see over that pile toward a future of our own making.  

An increasing number of people now understand that the China Virus was not only a tool for drowning the 2020 presidential election with illegal mail-in ballots devoid of chain of custody or security of any kind, but also a mechanism for undermining inherent personal freedoms while ushering in a new Super-State with near-total control over speech, social gatherings, ideas, and economic relations.

For decades, Americans have been trying to put an end to rampant illegal immigration that has both fractured local communities and impoverished working-class Americans already suffering from D.C.'s bipartisan efforts to send America's best manufacturing jobs to China.  And after the briefest respite arising solely from the efforts of President Trump (in direct opposition to the bipartisan consensus in D.C. that immigration crimes should be ignored), the border has never been more open.  Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas brags that he is so opposed to protecting the homeland's security that he spends all his time releasing illegal aliens throughout the U.S. while formulating plans to criminalize as "domestic extremists" Trump-voting veterans who actually sacrificed to protect America. 

Censorship is enforced by tech monopolists and corporate boards of directors who have decided that fascism pays better than freedom, and when they're not actively enforcing the new Marxist "social justice" nonsense upon their employees and customers, they're getting rich from overseas slave labor and the Federal Reserve's Wall Street cronyism that artificially pushes up stock values while guaranteeing a future dollar collapse for everyone else.

In America — the Land of the Free — the government now declares that it may mandate what goes into each citizen's body, decide which tenets of religion will be "allowed" to survive, outlaw speech it does not like, and tautologically vilify anyone who resists the State's illegitimate new powers as being an "enemy of the state."  Objecting to tyranny now makes one a "terrorist."  

The whole thing is so absurd and so unfathomable to most Americans that it is causing them to lose faith in any future at all.  We can't vote our way out if vote counts can't be trusted or if the Uniparty just continues seeding battleground states with tens of millions of illegal aliens who will either be granted immunity and voting privileges in short order or be encouraged to break our voting laws, just as they were encouraged to break our immigration laws.  Big Tech and Big Media have strangled information so successfully that the need for samizdat has returned.  Big Business and Big Government have worked together to transfer all the wealth of the middle class to the richest one percent of the one percent.  Vaccine passports promise a future of completely controlled movement.  Central bank digital currencies promise a future of completely controlled commerce.  Quarantine camps provide a convenient excuse for housing all the troublesome skeptics immune to groupthink socialism.  And Americans who are just itching for a chance to push back against the government's abuses are reminded daily that a few hundred unarmed January 6 Capitol "trespassers," whose technical crimes, if any, paled in comparison to those we've been forced to endure from the hands of the FBI-approved BLM and Antifa Marxists for several years, are still languishing in solitary confinement going on a full year now with laughably bereft American due process, proving that justice in the United States is, indeed, two-tiered.

Now, who could read through all that mess above and be optimistic about what is to come?  Easy.  Anybody who has been watching the Marxists' long march through history trampling over American freedoms one decade at a time, just hoping the day would arrive when enough people would wake up to the severity of the situation to do something about it.

There is nothing more potent than fellowship.  There is nothing more formidable than an idea whose time has come.  There is nothing more frightening to those with power than when those without power start seeing clearly.  Hope and courage are contagious, which is why governments concerned only with staying in power spread loneliness and despair.  The latter protect the status quo; the former shatter the status quo forever.  This is also why each step we take to reclaim our God-given freedoms will be met with greater insults to liberty and more forceful punishments from illegitimate government actors.  This Marxist authoritarianism draped in the new clothes of globalism and technocratic managerialism runs on personal misery and despondence.  It feasts on chronic human isolation.  It survives only by extinguishing the bonds that enliven us.  It should be no surprise that the most inhuman forms of government thrive only when each person's humanity is successfully denied.  When people understand that they have inadvertently handed their liberties to a government they no longer condone, then they begin remembering that they are many and their tormentors few.

Not long ago, the problems that plague us were treated as issues to be debated every few years; now they are understood as cancers worth fighting with each breath.  That's a huge step forward from where we once were.  Before every great social change throughout history, the people responsible for that change first created the language for what they were setting out to do.  Even when language fortified resolve, the costs of action remained daunting.

Imagine how many naysayers still existed in the American colonies after the Declaration of Independence was first published in 1776.  Troubles with England had already existed for over a decade.  War with England would engulf the next decade.  The Articles of Confederation didn't last the decade after that.  The U.S. Constitution and the whole American experiment in individual liberty almost evaporated when the British took a second bite at the apple during the War of 1812.  Although Americans who have resisted the brainwashing of the Marxists rewriting American history are fond of thinking of those five decades of uncertainty as being guided by God and destiny, they were filled with moments that could have stopped America's birth.  Only the unwavering fellowship of Americans clear in their purpose kept the nation on course.  Only in hindsight did everything seem certain.

We, too, find ourselves in uncertain and explosive times.  Enemies of freedom have hardened the battle lines.  Protectors of freedom have awakened to what's at stake.  And more and more people are seeing the light.  If you doubt that we're gaining ground, then just consider how hostile government now is.  The appeal of personal liberty — its resplendence, if you will — is far brighter and more attractive than the government would like, which is why, every day, its enforcers work so hard to keep us apart, lost, and in despair.  When we find courage through each other, we make their mission impossible.

So be strong, be vigilant, and be hopeful, and whatever else happens, stay in the light.

Image: WolfBlur via Pixabay, Pixabay License.

To comment, you can find the MeWe post for this article here.