Upcoming Opportunities to Be Offended

Memorandum

From: Memo Writer
Topic: That Burning Sensation in Your Ears Is the Truth

Abstract: The management intends to begin a series of posts dealing frankly with race, ethnicity, nationality, culture, religion, and other topics only liberals are allowed to talk about. Over the last several years management has reluctantly modified his position on these issues and reassessed what needs to be done in the best interest of the United States. Management will illustrate his positions and reasons for them with detailed anecdotes of personal encounters he has had. It has been the experience of management that liberals whine when confronted with similar views, with the exception of minority liberals, who squeal like stuck pigs and threaten bloody violence. Therefore, management would like to preface these posts with the following position statements:

Item 1: The Memo Writer was pro-minority rights before being pro-minority rights was cool.

Item 2: When the Memo Writer asks a group of liberals for a show of hands as to who has dated a person of another race, his hand is usually the only one in the air.

Item 3: The Memo Writer’s best friend, and best man at his wedding, is half Mexican

Item 4: The Memo Writer once had his heart broken at the loss of a child he was fostering, a 3/4s black girl left by an in-law.

Item5: When he was in the Navy, the Memo Writer treated the Filipino women with the utmost respect, even the bar girls, for which they often expressed gratitude.

Item 6: The Memo Writer likes all women, but admits that he finds exotic women particularly compelling and has always dreamed of taking a special such woman for his wife, though fate has always frustrated him in this goal.

Item 7: The Memo Writer must admit he is baffled when people  warn him about the mixed-race children that would result from a union such as in Item 6.

Item 8: What many people interpret as racism in the Memo Writer is, in fact, culturalism. The Memo Writer scoffs at the idea that any race is significantly better than any other on a genetic basis. He does, however, acknowledge the fact that all men, women, and especially cultures are not created equal. That some cultures, especially Western Civilization, are vastly and demonstrably superior to others.

Item 9: The Memo Writer’s pro-Western and pro-American beliefs do not mean he thinks his ethnic group is genetically superior to yours. The Memo Writer does not derive his sense of identity from his race. He derives it primarily from his nationality

Item 10: The Memo Writer believes that anyone can dump the garbage that was their old culture, take up the mantle of Americanism, and be his equal, possibly even his superior, in any endeavor.

The Liberal Lexicon: “H” Words and Phrases

The Fine Art of Liberal to English Translation

Contrary to popular belief, Liberals do speak a form of English. Their dialect, though strange, is quite similar to American English. In fact, the vocabulary, grammar, syntax, and even the accents are identical. So what accounts for all the heartache and confusion that plagues Libero-American relations? The answer is semantics, the linguistic field of word meanings. The concepts identified by the same words are often quite different between Liberal and American English. As a token of my desire to bridge this gap I humbly submit these translations.

The Definitions

1. Halliburton—an interjection frequently uttered by liberals when losing a debate.
2. Hate Speech— what occurs when a conservative’s lips move.
3. Heterosexual— An unimagination sexual partner. Also: an agent of impending Malthusian overpopulation.
4. Holocaust—the execution of convicted murderers.
5. Homephobe—any person who objects to men tongue-wrestling in front of an elementary school.
6. Homosexual—Highly imaginative sexual partner, marked by concern for population issues and a high degree of creativity.
7. Housewife/Homemaker—a fomer class of debased and degraded women who were rescued by feminists. Their liberation has freed up the time and resources necessary to research the mysterious increases in suicide, homicide, drug abuse, sexual abuse, theft, rape, prostitution, divorce, and academic failure.
8. Husband—slavemaster, sexual exploiter.
9. Hyphen(-)—a typographic character used with various demographic terms to ameliorate the offensiveness of the term “American” Example: Pervo-American.

Palin Nomination

I must have grown cynical about my own party. For instance, I considered the McCain nomination as the party’s way of saying, “We’re too tired to try to win.” So, I expected our VP pick to be either painfully conventional or election suicide. Sarah Palin looks pretty good based on the research I’ve done so far. Mostly, I’m amazed that McCain’s campaign did something so tactically brilliant. Not only does she appear to be a good choice, she gives disaffected Hillary-loving Obama-haters an opportunity to vent their anger. Now, if we had only nominated someone like Michael Steele for president, we would have a truly bullet-proof ticket. Maybe next time.

Sad, but True #5

Youth is wasted on the young; retirement is wasted on the old.

The Liberal Lexicon: “G” Words and Phrases

The Fine Art of Liberal to English Translation

Contrary to popular belief, Liberals do speak a form of English. Their dialect, though strange, is quite similar to American English. In fact, the vocabulary, grammar, syntax, and even the accents are identical. So what accounts for all the heartache and confusion that plagues Libero-American relations? The answer is semantics, the linguistic field of word meanings. The concepts identified by the same words are often quite different between Liberal and American English. As a token of my desire to bridge this gap I humbly submit these translations.

The Definitions

1. Gay—A term that formerly meant “very happy” but now designates someone who engages in male-on-male sex, while feminists find this undesirable because it makes not one but two men happy, it is still pretty nifty.
2. Germany—a formerly fierce European nation that is gradually becoming more effeminate than the French.
3. Girl—future victim of male exploitation.
4. God— the planet Earth, which we are not fit to walk upon.
5. Greed—An antisocial desire to keep money one has earned.
6. Gridlock— when conservatives don’t roll over and play dead.
7. Gulf War, First— A Republican temper tantrum resulting in the death of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi social workers who were just visiting their neighbors.
8. Gulf War, Second— A childish attempt by a son to impress his father by invading a sovereign country, killing innocent foreign tourists, and deposing a kindly stateman who had been duly elected by 100% of eligible voters.

Infants in Hell

Recently, we’ve all been treated to the spectacle of pro-abortion protesters screeching spittle-laden bile at calm and somewhat befuddled pro-life protesters. I’ve avoided the issue of abortion in my blog because life has taught me it is a totally polarized, and polarizing, issue. As such, there really is no winning a debate on the topic if you define winning as persuading someone against abortion. I’ve found that it is very rare for someone to actually switch sides. When it happens, it is usually because the person involved has finally realized that there are things more important than their short-term best interests and convenience, as many women made infertile directly or indirectly by the procedure can attest.

My oldest child was conceived while I was a Senior in high school. I was astounded by the almost universal reaction to this event. Almost to the last person, the question asked was, “Have you scheduled the abortion yet?” This was done by future in-laws (ironically, all good true-believing Catholics), friends, our teachers, the school counselors, medical people, and especially people at the clinic. When we announced our plans to keep our child, the near universal response was a groan, an eye-roll, and the exasperated words, “Oh, God!” You might say we made the wrong choice, but that “potential human being” is about to turn 30 years-old, is my only son, is a journeyman electrician, and has given me 3 totally awesome grandchildren. Sure, my life was harder, but I have no regrets, and I sleep well at night.

Not to say I didn’t waver from time to time in my opposition to the practice. While I would never consider the practice myself, I was occasionally partially persuaded by the arguments of the “pro-choice” crowd. (I hate that euphemism. What’s next? Will murdering an adult become “retroactive choice”?) I could never go totally over the line because, no matter what my mind said, my heart just kept screaming, “Hell no!” I bounced around like this for several years until about 25 years ago, I happened to be reading a book by Ayn Rand. I was reading an essay on human rights, human worth, and human dignity. It was very compelling. Finally, I read something that clicked in my mind and I said, That’s it! That’s why abortion is wrong!” To my horror, when I resumed reading the very next sentence stated that what I had just read was why the right to an abortion was absolute! Talk about cognitive dissonance. This all goes back to what I said about polarization and the difficulty of actually persuading someone by rational argument.

It is one thing to argue with someone who had his facts wrong, or has misinterpreted the facts, or some other issue relating to getting the true facts. The problem lies when people have the same facts, do a legitimate analysis—and come up with exactly the opposite answer than you did! You and your adversary have placed value judgments on the same data and come up with tragically opposite positions. I have come to believe that the pro-abortion stance isn’t so much immoral as it is amoral. In my conversations, and arguments with pro-abortion people, I don’t feel that something is wrong with them so much as I come away with the queasy feeling that something is missing.

The take home lesson there is that these people will never, and can never, be persuaded appeals to morals, ethics, logic, or reason. They can only be, and must be, defeated. To do otherwise is to waste valuable time while people die.

I’ve heard arguments that we should let the pro-abortion crowd have their abortions. That since they tend to be hard-core leftists they will weed themselves out of the gene pool. A good theory, but it breaks down in practice. Leftists import people from other countries to breed the dim-witted left-wing voters they are too lazy, or gay, to breed themselves. Besides, I think that is a rather cynical way to look at it. A newborn is innocent until it can make a conscious choice to do wrong. You have to give them a chance. They might decided to rebel against their parents by putting down the crack pipe and going out and getting a job.

Even the leftists claim that there is a responsibility, or even a duty, to watch out for and protect the weak, innocent, and vulnerable. What is more weak and innocent than an infant? What is more vulnerable than a weak and innocent infant trapped inside its murderer’s body? That truly is an infant in Hell.

Just for the Record

Just for the record. If the Obamessiah does win the presidency, I predict a decades-old position of mine will be disproven. For over 30 years I have confidently stated that there will never be a worse president that Jimmy Carter. I expect Jimmy will be bumped to 2nd place all too soon unless Obama can be put on a short leash like Clinton was when the Democrats lost control of Congress in 1994.

The Liberal Lexicon: “F” Words and Phrases

The Definitions

1. F—the grade you’ll get if your poli sci professor sees you at the Young Republicans rally or you speak up in class.
2. Fascist—Republican
3. Family—An outmoded social institution traditionally used by chauvanistic males to oppress and subjugate women and stifle the sexual expressiveness of children.
4. Fatherhood— the status of having sexually assaulted an exploited a woman.
5. Female Conservative —traitorous bitch.
6. Feminist—a pseudo-woman who lives in contstant fear that somewhere, somehow, someway, a man is happy.
7. Finger, Middle— debating technique used by liberals when unable to defend one of their premises.
8. Finger, Purple—an offensive gesture when brandished by ecstatic Iraqis, considered far worse that they middle finger (see above)
9. First Amendment— A supplementary clause added to The Constitution in order to prevent the existence of churches and to allow the use of foul language in front of small children.
10. Food Stamp— a medium of exchange that allows certain people to buy food with other people’s money. Recipients are unfairly prohibited from buying liquor or cigarettes with them.
11. France—What we want American to be when it grows up.
12. Freedom of Association— when liberal women reject men because of their income and height.
13. Freedom Fighter— an enemy of the United States or its allies that hasn’t killed anyone that you know yet.
14. French, The— residents of a European nation known chiefly for eating snails and inventing the military tactic of preemptive surrender.
15. Fully Funded—no fiscal oversight.
16. Fundamentalist—a Jew or Christian who isn’t kidding.

Public Education Must Die! #2

Reason Online once had an intriguing article by John Stossel on American education. He discusses an ABC Special Report that he did entitled “Stupid in America”.

As I’m sure that I’ve mentioned at some point, I’m a recovering public school teacher myself. A career that I committed myself to in a moment of altruistic weakness. I know, it’s a horrible thing for a individualistic, scientific, capitalistic, Objectivist, Age of Reason-loving man to do to himself. But after years of meeting and dealing with working teachers I began to feel a calling.

I realized that many of those kids probably went days at a time without hearing a rational voice, or without having their spirits and rational yearnings crushed, either by the teachers themselves of the pack animal-like mentality of their fellow students. I decided that I could make my contribution in that way.

Unfortunately, this was not to be so. When I started out I figured the easiest way to be a good teacher would be not to do all the stupid things my teachers did while I was growing up. All this accomplished was a greater appreciation of what my favorite teachers went through. It seems that half the stupid stuff my teachers said or did was district policy, the other half was state law. Maybe this is why administrators view innovation as equaling insurrection.

So we Americans pay more for education than any other nation on Earth and then get the following from Stossel’s article:

…we gave identical tests to high school students in New Jersey and in Belgium. The Belgian kids cleaned the American kids’ clocks. The Belgian kids called the American students “stupid.”

We didn’t pick smart kids to test in Europe and dumb kids in the United States. The American students attend an above-average school in New Jersey, and New Jersey’s kids have test scores that are above average for America.

The American boy who got the highest score told me: “I’m shocked, ’cause it just shows how advanced they are compared to us.”

We start off with a reminder of a peculiarly American phenomenon. The more time American kids spend in school the less they seem to know.

At age ten, American students take an international test and score well above the international average. But by age fifteen, when students from forty countries are tested, the Americans place twenty-fifth. The longer kids stay in American schools, the worse they do in international competition. They do worse than kids from countries that spend much less money on education.

This is a similar phenomenon to the one that Michael Barone wrote about in “Hard America, Soft America: Competition vs. Coddling and the Battle for the Nation’s Future“. It famously asked how a nation that produces so many spectacularly incompetent 18 year-olds can simultaneously produce so many extraordinarily competent 30 year-olds. In a nutshell, Soft American coddles them until they are 18 or so, then dumps them unprepared into the clutches of Hard America which rapidly separates the wheat from the chaff. A civilian baptism of fire if you will.

I find it interesting that Barone chose those two ages to compare. They are 12 years apart; the same amount of time it takes to earn a high school diploma. One might say that students spend 12 years getting their diploma and 12 years getting over getting it.

I have personal experience with this. I was fortunate (unfortunate?) to be smart enough to skate through public school. I could learn by “osmosis” as some people say, or as I liked to call it, the sit and “soak method”. Except for math, I could passively absorb enough information to pass my tests. I was the kind of student who got an A on almost every test, but a zero on almost every homework assignment because I rarely turn any in. It usually averaged out to a C and I could keep concentrating on “important” things, usually the bosom on the girl sitting next to me.

Going to college was almost as easy–at first. My coursework as an underclassman was pretty breezy too. Then I hit my upper division classes and found myself losing the battle against organic chemistry. I completely lacked the self-discipline necessary to tackle that course. Up until that time I had considered having to study 2 or 3 hours a week to be an outrageous burden. Nowadays, when I’m taking classes, I feel guilty if I don’t study 2 or 3 hours a day

Stossel’s article puts the blame on a cause familiar to card-carrying capitalists the world over:

This should come as no surprise once you remember that public education in the USA is a government monopoly. Don’t like your public school? Tough. The school is terrible? Tough. Your taxes fund that school regardless of whether it’s good or bad. That’s why government monopolies routinely fail their customers. Union-dominated monopolies are even worse.

And I would suspect that union-dominated government monopolies, like public schools, are the worst of all.

Tell Einstein to Sit Down and Shut Up

We’ve all seen it. That bumper sticker with the Albert Einstein quote: “You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war.”  Usually it is seen on the back of a poorly-maintained 20-year-old vehicle that belches smoke like a 19th Century smokestack. Liberals love it. One of the most brilliant physicists who has ever lived agrees with their position on war and the military. But that’s the problem now isn’t it? He was a brilliant at physics and not much else. Albert would have made a good poster child for the concept of multiple intelligences if it had been circulating back then. Few things he believed, and said, are more absurd that the quote above. It shows a profound lack of understanding of basic human nature. In fact, there is a quote from another person that says exactly the opposite: “If you would live in peace, prepare for war.”

My point? Precisely this: The world is filled with people that are bright, or at least cunning, in some area and they mistakenly believe that intelligence or cunning in one area necessarily translates into intelligence in all other areas. For instance, I have an ex that was good at math, but if you put a dollar sign in front of the numbers she couldn’t add, subtract, multiply, or divide to save her life, and her check book proved it.

My advice? Generally, don’t base your assessment of other people’s intelligence on their own assessment of it. Bear in mind that it’s quite common for someone to be a genius in one area and a blithering idiot in another. Make them prove themselves in areas outside of their expertise before you rely on them.

Specifically, my advice is to bear this all in mind until the November elections. Now that His Royal Smugness is the presumptive nominee we can expect to be treated to a display of just that sort of behavior. He is obviously bright in some ways, but the few positions he has dared to take openly show him to be incapable of learning from history, even recent history. Be vigilant, and keep an eye on the gullible around you.

The Memo Writers’s Observations on Life #2

Students at the Michael Moore Elementary School proudly display their winning entry in the Independence Day banner contest. By the way, God created dirty words so liberals wouldn’t be mute.

1. People shouldn’t drink and vote.
2. Voting for Democrats is nothing to be ashamed of, as long as you do it in the dark and wash your hands afterwards. (Apologies to Robert A. Heinlein.)
3. To liberals it will always be 1969.
4. Fifty-year-old men shouldn’t wear pony-tails.
5. Public schools have turned into giant under-staffed day care centers.
6. Left-wingers keep shrieking the same old tired talking points for the same reason that skydivers keep yanking on the ripcord of a parachute that has failed to open.
7. Why aren’t more open-border proponents studying Spanish and Arabic? They’re going to need it.
8. Liberals deeply resent the religionization of Christmas.
9. Feminists hate women.
10. Children don’t want freedom as much as they want parents.
11. Liberals think failure is a virtue.
12. Real life lesbians don’t look like the ones in the movies.
13. Most university professors have lost their key to the clue locker.
14. The concept of an objective reality makes liberals wake up screaming at night.
15. The French still think they’re significant.

Do Liberals Ever Listen to Themselves? 2

Check out the video of the Denver abortion clinic protest. It’s pretty typical fare for the pro-homicide fanatics, but towards the end one of the loons makes some fairly ironic comments. He yells at an opponent, “Run your life, not your mouth! Run your life, not ours!” This is more evidence that among the lefties the absolute freedom of speech is only absolute for the proper people—themselves. If you dare disagree, you must be silenced.

Then, of course, there is the whole issue of running our own lives. Haven’t we been demanding that, in vain, since God-knows-when? Aren’t they the ones who have imposed upon us laws that say we can’t discipline our own children, that force us to send those children to schools who don’t teach but rather indoctrinate, that force us through taxation to support charities and government programs that actively work against our most deeply held values, and that try to disarm us—sometimes successfully—so that we cannot defend ourselves against the criminals whom they let roam the streets? I don’t smoke, but I find it galling that some lefties believe they have the right to tell smokers that they shouldn’t be allowed to smoke in their own homes or cars.

The sad truth that the idiot in the video doesn’t get is that they have been gleefully trying to run our lives for decades, sometimes successfully, sometimes less so, but always trying with maddeningly insane persistence. The problem for them is that this is an issue the non-lefties have decided is just one step too far, and they have dug in their heels on this one. I find it very illustrative that when confronted pro-abortionists throw a temper tantrum reminiscent of a child caught with his hand in the cookie jar and desperately trying to distract from the issue at hand. If you’re not doing anything wrong, then why do you act so guilty?

I could go on, but you get the point.

Who Are All These People and Why Are They Cheering?

Years ago in my nebulous past I saw or read an item that claimed the Austrians, much like Lucy Ricardo, had “a lotta ’splainin’ to do”. Many people commonly assume that the Nazi’s annexation of Austria (the Anschluss) back in World War 2 was just another in a long line of fascist outrages from the era. No doubt that was true for many, but the fact remains that when Nazi troops marched into Austria they met, to their surprise, no resistance. Rather, they were treated to throngs of cheering locals giving fascist salutes, waving Nazi flags, and throwing flowers. The event has been referred to as the blumenkrieg-the war of flowers. The author of that long-ago piece wanted an end to the Austrian silence about those days. Most of all, he wanted to ask those cheering throngs: Exactly what were you cheering about?

I find myself asking that same question about my fellow Americans as we skip and dance blithely toward Obamageddon. An ocean of warnings about the man have gone unheeded, if not unnoticed. In a nutshell, they reduce to, “We know almost nothing about this man and the little we know is bad.” I watch my fellow Americans react to the Obamessiah and I see orgiastic scenes of my national brothers and sisters foaming at the mouth with mindless, virtually orgasmic ecstasy. I must admit, I truly didn’t realize how bad it was until an exchange I had with my best friend of nearly 30 years. I made a casual, and mild for me, comment about Obama and was shocked and astounded when he nearly bit my head off in anger. He is the most intelligent man I know. If he was sucked-in to the madness, what chance do we mere mortals have?

I have my theories about why this is, and I hope they’re all wrong. I’ve already been forced to revise my opinion about my country downward too many times already. For a man virtually defined by his patriotism, to do so is pure torture.

There have been any number of atrocities committed throughout history: the Holocaust, the Reign of Terror, bloody purges of all kinds, and so on. I’ve heard thoughtful people look back at history and ask: “How can an entire nation simply lose its mind?” I fear they soon we have all the empirical evidence that they will ever need.

Who Is Dumber, Charlie Rangel or the People Who Keep Electing Him?

I just tortured myself with 4:22 of Charlie Rangel positing, in typical leftist fashion, that the only solution to a problem is much more of the problem. In this case, illegal immigration. Charlie states, literally and explicitly mind you, that the “bad guys” in the immigration issue are the border sheriffs trying to enforce the law. These folks, Rangel says, arrest people purely for the purpose of getting on TV.

Rangel further compares the status of illegal immigrants to slavery, naturally. Most likely because he doesn’t know any other analogies. He claims that opposing illegal aliens is like wanting to get rid of all the slaves and still benefit from the work that they do. I think a better analogy would be a liberal who cooked and ate the goose that laid the golden eggs because he didn’t feel like going to the store—and then threw a tantrum when it wouldn’t lay golden eggs any more.

I’m starting to think that universal suffrage was an idea whose time didn’t come.

Yawning While Uncle Sam Bleeds Out

A few days ago Condoleezza Rice stated that America would be just fine under an Obama administration. That, of course, depends on how things go down and especially on how you define “just fine”. It has been repeatedly observed that Obama is a cipher. Cipher being, for those of you too lazy to click on a free on-line dictionary is a zero; one that has no weight, worth, or influence; a nonentity; a method of transforming a text in order to conceal its meaning; a coded message. One couldn’t ask for a more thorough description of the man as we know and understand him today. He is a ghost, a phantom, a shadow in the dark at best.

You have to ask yourself, “How does a man get to be in his late 40s and the presidential nominee of the largest political party in the United States, and do it all while leaving little more than vapors as his background?”

I have been mocked by a few folks for believing that John McCain would be a good president. Which is strange, because I don’t believe that. I believe John is the classical example of the lesser of two evils. The only candidates I could enthusiastically support were the first ones eliminated, which should have told me more than it did about the state of intellectual obliviousness prevalent in this election cycle. I don’t believe that John McCain would be a good president. I just believe he’ll screw the country up less and that the mess he leaves will be fixable—mostly.

Obama is like some physical phenomenon that can’t be observed directly, atoms for example, and we can only learn about him through indirect means. The man’s critics have been accused of practicing guilt by association but when that’s all you’ve got, that’s all you’ve got. Besides, if I find out that your best friend spends most of his time hanging out with drug cartel hit men, that tells me a lot about your friend—and you. One only has to go out one degree of separation to find a myriad of two-legged cockroaches scurrying away from the light. Saul Alinsky, for example. and in his case a list of his disciples is a veritable rogues gallery in its own right.

So is Condoleezza right? Will America be just fine? As I said, that all depends. If the man gets too cocky and overreaches himself in his efforts to make America a socialist paradise and just another neighborhood in the global village, I say yes. We’ll have a few really, really bad years. The nation and Congress will realize their mistake and dig in, marginalizing him until he can be voted out of office. America would be truly just fine. We would only have wasted a few years which is small when you consider the 1930s or the 1960s and realize that, as a nation, we’ve wasted entire decades and survived.

But what about the far more likely case? Obama gets what he wants while the unthinking herds of the electorate get what they deserve. Then we get to the matter of definition. If you define “just fine” as American still existing pretty much as is at the end of his term, then yes we’ll be just fine. If you define “just fine” as the existence of some political entity calling itself “The United States of America” a century or so down the line, then yes we’ll be just fine.

But what if you define “just fine” differently? What if you define it as a constitutional republic with freely elected representatives? What if you define it as a sovereign nation-state actively seeking to achieve its best interest in the long-term? What if you define it as a distinctive English-speaking culture that stresses the traditional ideals of Western Civilization, especially the Anglo-American model? A culture that stresses individualism and self-reliance? A free-market economy where one is taxed lightly and only for direct benefits that he receives that can’t be provided by the free market, such as national defense and protection from people who think like Obama?

Well, friends if you define “just fine” that way—as I do—then we are well and truly screwed.

The more I study the man, the more concerned I become. A similar reaction to what I’ve experienced in my studies of Islam and Muslims. (The more you know, the more you wish you didn’t know.) No, Obama wouldn’t kill the country by his second day in office, nor by the end of—God forbid!—his second term. But he could very well be the guy who nicks that artery that allows Uncle Sam to slowly bleed out over the next forty or fifty years. Don’t believe it? Look back fifty years to the 1950s and what could and couldn’t be done then, what was thinkable and unthinkable.

Science fiction author Robert Heinlein wrote a number of stories described as being “if this goes on…” in nature. I submit that if the country continues on its current trajectory that within most of our lifetimes, we could all find ourselves Strangers in a Strange—and Hostile—Land.