There is an old Twilight Zone episode called “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street.” In short, neighbors on a small street turn on each other as random things keep happening, electric goes off and on, cars won’t start, stoves and mowers won’t work. The neighbors meet to discuss it A small boy tells them that he has heard there is alien invasion and the aliens are pretending to be a normal family in the neighborhood. As the random outages continue and move down the street, the neighbors begin to accuse each other, fight, break windows and go nuts.
In the last scene, we see two alien figures standing on the hill near the neighborhood. They comment on how simply fiddling with consistency leads people to descend into paranoia and panic, and that this is a pattern that can be exploited. They also discuss their intention to use this strategy to conquer Earth, one neighborhood at a time. They then ascend a stairway into their spaceship.
I feel like we are there. And I am afraid we are at the point of no return.
Recent events have shown us how crazy things can get; impeaching a President who is out of office for violence he did not cause, a representative accusing a Senator of “almost getting her murdered,” the Speaker of the House saying she is afraid the other party is dangerous, threats to remove Senators and Representatives who expressed an opinion that others don’t like. It goes on and on.
News channels call at least half of the country “terrorists” just because they support a certain political figure, Homeland Security targets people who peacefully protested ” domestic violent extremists,” and social media platforms ban certain opinions because the owners don’t like them.
Companies seek to cut off certain politicians and Congress itself wants to keep certain political protesters from ever getting a job in the government. Even soldiers who have fought for this country are targeted for their political views.
But with all that, I find something else more troubling. While I know social media can be an absolute cesspool with anonymous people passionately and not too politely sharing their opinions, I had an incident tonight that makes me believe we are too far gone to ever come back together as a country.
My Representative in Congress, Andy Harris, put up a post thanking the National Guard for their work in D.C. for the fauxnaguration. It was a nice post. I commented and thanked him for recognizing them and asked that he would please help defend the opinions and free speech of all.
Now, I’m no saint. I’ll admit I can get somewhat salty on social media. But this was a tame post and I thought fairly positive. Boy was I wrong.
Immediately, a young lady named Rachel replied and said something to the effect of ” you poor white person feeling persecuted for the first time ever. What a snowflake.” She threw in several other derogatory comments. I was shocked.
So I told her that I thought her comment was hateful and inappropriate. I also asked her how she knew I was white ( my profile pic is not my pic.) I told her that she was stereotyping because she assumed that all people of my political beliefs were white. I told her it was a racist comment. I then blocked her and reported the post to Facebook as hate speech.
The next comment was the real clincher. A young woman named Jennifer wrote to me that she had seen my FB posts and memes and had determined that I had no political views but just random unconnected thoughts and that I was a psychopath. Wow. She even included the clinical definition of that condition and called Representative Harris a deviant. Those are pretty strong condemnations. Telling a person they are mentally ill because of an opinion is way beyond the pale. ( Isn’t that what the Nazis, and Communists in the USSR and China did to people who disagreed?)
I asked her if she was a psychologist since it didn’t seem she was. I also said that her comment was bullying at the least and could be slander or liable. I also told her that I felt threatened by her because her opinion was so violent in nature.. I also said she had slandered Rep. Harris. I reported her and blocked her. A friend of mine also responded to her and reported her.
This is where we are. I saw many posts in response to Rep. Harris, some I completely disagreed with. I just scrolled past. At no point did I decide to jump in and call anyone a psychopath. But it seemed there were people waiting in the wings to name call anyone who made a positive comment to him.
It has come to this point. We are fellow Americans and we hate each other without even knowing each other!
How can we ever repair this? Can we? Can we ever go back to living side by side? I’m not sure we can. The Left wants total control so much that they are willing to throw the rights of 75 million people out the window. While claiming to want unity, they want all dissenters silenced, arrested, reprogrammed and ultimately gone. I’m sure Jennifer thinks I should be institutionalized at the very least.
Those of us on the right are not blameless. We have let the Left get away with this constant chipping away of the beliefs that made this country great. We have responded meekly or stayed silent while allowing them to run roughshod over the rest of us. This is especially true with our politicians, who seem more interested in being non-controversial and politically correct than honest and strong.
We have let the social media big technology companies, the teachers’ unions, and the entertainment and news industry mold the minds of our population with impunity while we weren’t paying attention. And it seems their main objective is dividing us as much as possible.
I’m not sure we can live together anymore, but it doesn’t seem like an amicable divorce or compromise is possible. Some have mentioned secession. Others have mentioned Civil War. I’m not sure where this goes. I hope the solution is not violence, but history seems to tell us that it almost always is.
So, I am reminded of that 1959 Twilight Zone episode. The closing commentary of that show was this,” The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices…to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill…and suspicion can destroy…and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own—for the children and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to the Twilight Zone.”
Sadly, I think that is where we are.
