Dark days are upon us

Dark days are upon us.

The heartless command, our attention at the very least. It may be a
madman with an Arabic name; it could be a finance minister whose
madness won't allow him to admit he is wrong.

Our minds are not being molded, they are being violated, bludgeoned,
abused, every bit as debilitating as any comparable physical abuse, but
as Stockholm taught us, it is possible to love one's abusers. It's not
mentally healthy, but it is a survival strategy.

Democracy hasn't been taken from us. You can't lose what you never
had. What has been taken from us, though, is our democratic ideals and
beliefs. In the United States, money talks; it's speech is free. Here in
Europe, we politicize instead - it's so much more sophisticated - and we
simply deny sovereign states their sovereignty. Both methods are
employed in the name of "unity", but we're not one, nor of one mind, nor
should we be, but we will be made to be alike.

It's not the silence of the masses that frightens me. What does
frighten me is the moment of their awakening to the realization that
they have been lied to, manipulated, and extorted. No, right now, what
makes me so uneasy is the silence of those who should know better.
Perhaps they have been bought; perhaps they have been intimidated;
perhaps they have simply lost hope. It doesn't really matter when the
results are the same.

The paternalization of society, not just here in the West, and
misguided feminism (only in the West) have made everyone just a bit more
manly: we're so easily distracted by shiny, glittering, but ultimately
worthless little things. We can argue for days about meaningless,
trivial, irrelevant details, yet we won't admit, neither to ourselves
nor to others, that there's a real problem that needs to be solved.
We're in crisis mode all the time. Men are, as you know, always in
crisis mode.

Dark days are upon us. And, they will not find the light as long as
we can be distracted, frightened, threatened, intimidated and bullied
into thinking that different is dangerous, that otherness is
ostracizing, and that only each of us can save him- or herself.