These Dying Lands

by Scott Creighton

Yes they are deliberately undermining faith in our institutions for some of us... for the others they are pushing the line of tolerance as far as they can. Almost like they know something big is coming and they need to prepare the masses for some major suspension of disbelief.

For the rest of us, they don't care anymore. We will either get our minds right or we wont. But we damn sure wont talk openly about it until it is far too late... just take the lessons being learned from Covid and the election rigging. Hindsight is the new black.

As far as becoming an ex-pat goes...

... many are in the process now I guess. I always wondered what went thru someone's mind to get them to the point where they leave the world they know for something entirely new and mysterious.

The devil you know is preferable and remains so until 'a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce (you and yours) under absolute Despotism, it is (your) right, it is (your) duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for (your) future security'

Ah, there's the rub. Its not just plotting a new course for you and your family, its abandoning the dream, the myth, the hope of this once promising nation that gives one pause.

To cut and run. Because no matter the circumstance, in the end, that is how Americans are conditioned to think and perhaps that is the greatest indoctrination of all.

'mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves '

In The Patriot, the antagonist refused to raise arms against a sea of troubles until he found them bleeding on his very doorstep and all he had built under his own comfortable oppression was ripped from his grasp. Not very inspiring in terms of heroic motivation if you ask me but honest.

Painfully honest.

'all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it'

In the end I think we, the most aware and least obedient, stay because no matter how cynical, we are also the most naively optimistic.

It takes a lot of hope to be this dire.

'This country is hard on people. You can't stop what's coming. It ain't all waiting on you. That's vanity.'

Despair and comfort are powerful sedatives. That's why they are reserved for the experienced, not the young. For those of means and not the desperate. Their opiate is misdirected angst fueled by the riches of self-righteous indignation.

The Gen-Z brownshirts.

I dont know what it takes to reach that point where you board that ship to the Undying Lands. If there is such a place. What dreams may come in that undiscovered country? What regrets?

If all this seems like rambling, forgive. It's early as Beau sleeps at my feet. But these are my roots. I know no others. And as poorly as they reflect on how poorly I led my one beautiful chance on this mortal coil, they are still all I know, all I love and all the world to me.

These dying lands are my home. I dream of no other.