From John Wilder at Wilder, Wealthy and Wise comes America: Walking The Razor’s Edge
…But that ridge (to me) was a razor’s edge. On either side was disaster. I took a deep breath. I put one foot in front of the other. And I walked – one step, two steps, three steps – to the top, where my friends were waiting.
What brought this to mind was an email forwarded by frequent commenter, 173dVietVet, where he said (in part) this on discussing where our country is:
“(I’ve) Done a bit of mountain climbing in my Ranger days and I know full well the meaning of knife’s edge, where any wrong step throws you headlong forever into the abyss of death that lies on BOTH sides . . . .”
We are in that zone. In climbing mountains, the knife edge is more than a metaphor – it’s real. On either side is death, and it’s not metaphorical death, it’s mangled into a wadded pile of Wilder by the combined forces of gravity and the sudden stop on the rocky outcropping at the bottom. Sure, Wile E. Coyote could survive, but not me.
But in life, the knife-edge is a metaphor. We’ve created a financial situation where the economy is horribly broken, and for the last year we’ve survived mainly by printing money and not allowing people to be evicted from houses, despite the questionable legality of that.
A bigger component to our knife edge is that the rule of law has been progressively ignored in the country. Where is the right of the Federal Government to stop evictions of tenants?
Oh, there isn’t one. They just made it up.
That would be (at best) an action by a State, though even then it’s of questionable legality. But then the Patriot Act made spying on American citizens “legal” so who cares about legal, anyway? Then every agency with three letters of an alphabet decided to swallow up all of that online data, and all of the phone calls, despite laws to the contrary.
Of course, Federal employees were put in prison.
Hahahaha!
No.
Despite obviously illegal orders, no one was put in prison, and the only one likely to be put into prison is the whistleblower (Edward Snowden) if he ever shows back up in the United States. It used to be the Constitution that was ignored, but that’s so 1940s.
Now, the government can ignore any inconvenient law it wants to ignore. Of course, the people that can ignore the law are those that are either leaders, government employees, or those favored (think Antifa™) by the government.
Destroy evidence? A felony for most. But when the government does it? It’s “a regrettable incident.”
What people misunderstand is that Trump isn’t at all the cause of our problems today. Trump is a symptom. Without Trump, the answer would have been (yet another) Bush, this time Jeb, versus (yet another) Clinton, this time Hillary. Oh, the excitement for electing ¡Jeb!
The difference between another Clinton and another Bush? Nothing, really. And America didn’t want that – so America elected Trump. If anything, Trump cleared the fog, and made the knife edge we were walking clearer.
And now, we are walking, and the knife-edge is sharper and narrower than the one that I walked to get to the top of that mountain on July 4th a couple of decades ago.
We have left the bounds of Constitutional governance some time ago – people think it’s quaint when I bring the entire idea of the Constitution up. Is there a path back to an actual Constitutional government?
Sure. It’s narrow – a knife-edge. But so was getting that Constitutional government in the first place. But getting that original Constitution depended upon men climbing a mighty steep mountain several hundred years ago. Were they afraid when they saw the cliff’s edge, the price of failure?
I’m sure they were. But yet they continued. And when it was time to thread that final few steps to the summit?
They did, and damn the dangers on either side.
We face the same knife-edge. Where are we going?
Lower Valley Assembly 