Once upon a time, I styled myself a moderate.

Once upon a time, I styled myself a moderate. 

Taking great pride and a certain smug superiority because I was non-partisan, I wrote about how I could see the value of both sides of the liberal-conservative political equation. 

I talked about the solid bedrock that underlay the traditional conservative worldview. I tempered my liberal views with a generous sprinkling of moderation and a conviction that slow but steady progress would solve the ills of society.   

Tolerance of diversity and a toe dipped into cultural relativism had me convinced that there was room for all views in a civil society. 

In short; I was a fool. 

No longer do I call myself a moderate. The right walked away from reasonable decades ago and those of us on the left who are still clinging to the notion that we can reclaim some type of balance are simply in denial. Those days are behind us. 

The hard truth is that there never was balance, we never had the freedom we preached about from classrooms to pulpits. Those who waved the Constitution, and the flag did so to distract whites from the evil that festered in plain sight. Things like; chattel slavery, segregation, the subjugation of women, abuse of children, and the wealthy wringing the rest of the population of their last drops of blood, sweat, and tears.  

The society the mythic founders planted in the United States has never been about what’s good for us, the citizens of that society. It’s about what’s good for the people in power and only the people in power. 

Those forces have used the levers of power to hold on to their place at the top for hundreds of years. For much of our history, they hid their actions behind the lack of public information. That is no longer the case. The internet has laid bare much of what was hidden. 

So we see the oligarchs of the world moving to control the narrative. To close off those sources of information that give us a glimpse of what’s really happening behind the screen. We see them at the controls and they will do anything to change that. 

Social upheaval is no longer something that may happen in some distant future. It’s here, now. We are the ones history will judge for sitting on our hands and doing nothing while the evil grows, while autocracy creeps, while fascism steps out of the shadows and takes its place on center stage of a new century.

The right is armed and organized. War is upon us regardless of whether we want it or not. How we choose to fight it will determine not only our own fate, but that of generations to come.