Winds Of Change (American Revelation IV, Part Six.)

I follow the Moskva
Down to Gorky Park
Listening to the wind of change
An August summer night
Soldiers passing by
Listening to the wind of change

The world is closing in
Did you ever think
That we could be so close, like brothers
The future's in the air
I can feel it everywhere
Blowing with the wind of change ~Scorpions, Winds Of Change (1990)

Depending on the poll, as of this morning anywhere from 38% to 41% of Americans still support Donald Trump. Low numbers are good.

But in Trump's case low numbers are normal and almost not even noteworthy as a result.

Plus, I'll happily cite the last four years as reasons not to give a damn what the polls are saying, Trump's numbers were abysmal before he got elected, too.

That said, despite the fact that low numbers have been the story of his presidency all along, there's something about this last couple of weeks that feels different, and not always in a good way. I keep saying that this feels like 1989 to me, except Trump has turned us into East Germany.

And as I've said, there's a reason for that feeling. It's not just the protesters themselves, nor their refusal to back down nor the fact that they haven't gotten bored or tired and gone home. That's good energy, that gives me hope.

But then, there's also the people who are opposed to mass protests against police brutality, systemic racism and a wannabe dictatorship. The fact that we even have those, much less so many of them, bothers me.

In the country most synonymous with the idea of democracy itself, we have millions of people with a hankering for dictatorship, fascism, jackboots and racism. Because they somehow think fascism won't come for them, that they won't be affected or that only their mostly-imagined class and racial enemies will be killed, or that those they desire to have power over will be the only ones subjugated, they have a hunger for the taste of boot-leather.

There's some people, like Kurt Schlichter (per the snipped Tweet) who are explicit about this. I mean, this asshole wrote an entire series of shitty novels that are basically Turner Diaries fan-fiction.

But there's lots more who cloak their bullshit in apathy and memes and a kind of fake-centrism that vanishes and is replaced with shitty nihilism and whataboutism when it's actually challenged. We ran into this with a guy at my work last week.

Fascism comes for everybody in the end. Many of Hitler's worst henchmen, like Joseph Goebbels, killed their own families before committing suicide. Some German officers whose captured units had maintained some level of good order and discipline were still executing deserters and violators of various military infractions by firing squad in May of 1945 when they had to borrow rifles from their American or British captors to shoot said alleged criminals with, or on the other side of the line, simply handing them over to the Soviet NKVD who'd do the killing for them.

Hell, throw enough other people under the bus that way and you might even be able to get the Commies to consider you one of their own, or at least a useful Stukach (informer) who should not be killed outright.

And when the hammer comes down, lots of these fucking people will sanitize their internet histories and passionately deny that they were ever a racist or a Trump Supporter and go back under the rocks from whence they came.

But there are others who will go to ground and to their level best to fight to keep their racism and white superiority, if not make a full on play for White Supremacy just because hey, at this point they're already in trouble. So, from a certain point of view the other side is going to start thinking "Go big or go home" and you have to remember these are people who don't believe in civilization in the first place. More to the point, there will be those who will welcome them with open arms and weaponize them against their fellow citizens and try to break off a piece of America for their own use as some shitty little banana republic if Trump is driven from power or loses the election

Because yes, racism really is more important to these people than America is.

Things are changing, but just as people have fought and died to bring about that change, there will be those who would lay down their lives...or the lives of others...to resist it.

We cannot forget this or grow apathetic or overconfident ourselves. What we see here is what I've been saying all along. As I have always said there's somewhere between a quarter and a third of Americans who are just plain crazy, evil, or never bothered to learn basic humanity in the first place.

Keep on these bastards, but be prepared for what comes.

Part Five.
Part Seven.