It Couldn't Happen Here

I was watching excerpts from Glen Beck’s recent D.C. extravaganza which, for the most part, struck a more reasoning tone than we’d come to expect. But in one segment he shouted and paced the stage like a caged tiger. My brief first thought turned to the Third Reich.

My second thought was that it couldn’t happen here. During much of Hitler’s ascendency we had our own problems with the Great Depression. We also had scavengers like Father Coughlin, Huey Long and, from the extreme left, Communism, which drew many who appeared on Joe McCarthy’s list fifteen years later. But we survived and Germany didn’t.

The generally accepted and plausible explanation is that we were made of sterner stuff. But the suffering we went through was considerably less and of a shorter duration than Germany’s, which began well before the 1929 market crash that heralded what was to come. It’s reasonable to wonder how much more it would have taken to turn this country upside down.

At this time what is passing as the establishment in one of our two major political parties is trying to do just that, albeit for just the two plus years necessary to gain complete control of the government. What would be left is not as important to these people as the fact that they and their financial partners would control it. Their intent to destroy a four year presidency at its inception was confirmed by one of their leading legislators using the allegoric “Waterloo” to send the new president his best wishes. This approach is by definition deliberately harmful to the nation, and is in spirit, although not legally, perilously close to treason.

We are not hurting, nor do we figure to hurt, as badly as we did during the Great Depression. But today’s organized opposition, both beneficiaries and their gullible minions a bit long in the tooth, as a group have been spoiled compared to their predecessors and quite possibly to those who’ll follow them. Consequently they have a low threshold for what qualifies as hard times. Unlike Depression victims who reflected despair these folks have the luxury of being able to respond in anger, with which they are well endowed. Their deficiency in numbers is compensated by a high decibel level.

The voters who will join and eventually replace them are generally of a different breed. They aren’t familiar with all the “old values” that their elders hold sacred. They tend to be more tolerant of a president with a pigmentation and people of a sexual preference differing from theirs. The influence of today’s domestic “insurgents” will decrease by attrition, unless these reckless people, in the short time they might have, remove any pretense of our being a democracy. But then that could never happen here, could it?

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