I keep hearing about how close we are to civil war. That’s wrong. We’re not close. We’re in it. It’s a cold civil war, but it will turn hot and we will lose it if we continue pretending it’s not even happening. You can’t win a war you won’t admit you’re fighting. And the way to win the cold civil war is difficult, painful, and costly. It is by aggressively prosecuting and/or neutralizing Trump and every element of his terrorist movement. That is the only course of action that prevents a fascist takeover of the United States.

And when I say “every element” I mean EVERY ELEMENT.

The stupid grunts on the ground who can easily be whipped into attacking governmental institutions – the traitors we saw on Wednesday.

The leadership elite who spread the lies and agitate the troops. Trump, Miller, Hawley, Cruz – it’s a long list.

The propaganda arm that perpetuates the lies and helps organize the thought structure. This is the biggest pillar of the whole thing. I’m talking about FOX News, OANN, Breitbart, Newsmax, but also Parler, Twitter, Facebook to the extent that they facilitate the spread of propaganda.

The financing arm. The banks and megacorporations and billionaires that are funding this attack on the US.

The intelligence & infiltration arm. The police who are KKK, who open the gates for the attackers.

This is a vast and well-organized fascist movement against the United States. It will not be happy until our government is subjugated or destroyed. It is a cancer on American democracy and needs to be surgically removed.

I understand doing this will make the fascist movement angry. I understand they may retaliate. That is what fascist movements do. The alternative is to capitulate to them, pussy-foot around the issue, and try to find a way to make fascists be less angry without calling them to account. That doesn’t work. It hasn’t worked the last four years. It has never historically worked in any country where a fascist movement rose. That approach is exactly what got us the attack on the capitol this week. A soft response to that attack emboldens it. It encourages more attacks.

My wife really crystalized this for me last night. Imagine that Trump was just a bit more savvy and had planted 5 people in that mob charged with planting bombs in the capitol, on a timer switch. They could have easily gotten them in there – everyone had backpacks. They could have killed everyone in the building, eliminating the entire Legislative branch. Or imagine Trump had walked down to the capitol with them, like he said he would, and stood on the front steps screaming, “Drag Nancy Pelosi out here!”

Does it really seem that hard to imagine? We were THIS CLOSE to an absolute collapse of the US government. THIS CLOSE. There are fascists in this country, right now, who realize that. They see the roadmap. They are making plans.

This is not about healing the country. You heal AFTER the surgery, not before. This is about defense of our way of life against threats domestic. This is a cold civil war. I hope it never turns hot, but we need to fight it as hard as we fought the last cold war. We need to fight it as if our lives and our freedoms are on the line because THEY ARE, people. They are.

An old man walks to a podium in a silent room. There are no crowds. There is no applause. The nation he loves has been reduced to this: lonely and distant, sickened, cut off from its allies and friends. He can speak to his countrymen only through the camera lens, and so he begins, fighting the feeling that he is speaking only to himself.

Imagine the fear. The vertigo. The disorientation of a 77-year-old who has spent his life in front of cheering crowds, forced now to speak to an empty chamber.

Yet he does it.

He rises to the moment, because he must.

Is he the right person? Did the voters who chose him make the right decision? The questions are academic now, consigned to the judgment of history. He is the nominee. There is no going back.

He speaks in this alien room, this macabre reflection of the country he loves. He addresses a nation that is nearly unrecognizable to itself, bleeding and burning and alone. And he extends compassion.

He extends empathy.

He extends hope.

He delivers them like he has found us in the desert, and we receive them as if he is dripping water into our parched mouths. As if we have forgotten the taste of moisture and sustenance. We lap them up and feel our strength slowly recover, our muscles slowly loosen. And when we are able, at last, to stand again, he reminds us that we are Americans.

And what that means.

He reminds us that we have beaten this particular enemy before. That we are a nation of immigrants, of diversity – that it is not our weakness, but our strength. He reminds us – this old man, this stuttering, feeble creature – how to stand in defiance.

He is weak and old, just like his country – yet the fire still burns. His love for his nation, for the dreams of its highest ideals. You can hear it in every word, see it in his eyes.

He is not done. Despite his age, despite his weakness, he will not quit the fight. Will not end his defiance. Will not simply allow the nation he loves to slip into oblivion.

And as our will floods back into us, as we realize with crushing relief that this man is equal to the challenge, we realize:

Neither will we.

Impeachment is the right course of action, it is long overdue, and I’m happy to see it start. This guy literally walked into the office with impeachable offenses hanging around his neck in the form of businesses he refused to divest from, and it has only escalated from there.

The conduct unbecoming of the office is impeachable. The multiple obstruction of justice charges are impeachable. The collusion with Russia is impeachable. Stealing money from the military is impeachable. Ignoring multiple court orders is impeachable. Creating concentration camps for children is impeachable.

This latest thing is just that – the latest thing. Personally I hope the final articles are a mile long and list every infraction for which he deserves removal, but I understand that may not be the smartest move politically. I also understand the odds of the Senate voting to convict are slim to none… but it’s early days. Very early.

If nothing else, I hope every single minute of what is sure to be a long, painful impeachment investigation leaves him sick and sweating bullets.

Children of a Broken Sky is currently featured on a video blog featuring “suspenseful books with religious elements.” Kinda cool! Take a look.

https://wiki.ezvid.com/m/12-suspenseful-reads-with-religious-themes-OG9zx3jGIRv0z

For the record, no – the irony of being featured right next to a post about “How to read the Bible” is not lost on this atheist. But hey, we starving artist types take what we can get.

You know those nights where you’re walking up the street with your wife and the tornado siren goes off? When the storm whips up and you have to dash back a block to the last sandwich shop you passed and get inside for safety from the storm, but when you go through the back door it just leads to an outdoor gazebo and a bathroom in a concrete installation (kind of like something you’d find at a public park)? And you tell your wife and daughter (who is with you too, of course) that the gazebo is not safe from a tornado and you have to go to the concrete installation, but they won’t listen to you because the gazebo is filling with frantic people who apparently think it’s safe, so when the tornado appears with a scream like a freight train you panic and run back without them?

You dart into the bathroom ashamed and terrified, wishing they had come with you but not willing to die for nothing, and discover a human-sized plastic sphere in the bathtub just large enough for three. With a pang you climb in alone and secure yourself just as the tornado peels away the roof of the bathroom, and then with a lurch and a bang the ground falls away and you are jerked into the storm. You see the destruction play out below you as countless screaming people are killed. You see buildings and cars torn apart like paper. You wonder, as you are buffeted helplessly higher and higher, if there is any chance you will survive. Any chance at all.

And then you glimpse, through the shrieking blackness of the tornado and the churn of its wreckage, the sizzling green aura of some massive beast, some unthinkable abomination older than the sun, for whom the tornado itself is merely a cloak, a shroud beneath which it can work its impossible, unstoppable devastation. And you feel your mind peel away in layers, sanity falling away beneath you like the ground did just a moment ago, exposing some seething, sparking madness that has always been there, as surely as the certain bizarreness of the quantum realm underpins every moment of our lives. You are launched ever higher, leaving earth and safety and sanity below, until you can see the infinite walls forming a tunnel that is suddenly somehow below you, and the words printed on its wall:

YOU ARE OVER FULL.

YOUR MIND IS OVER FULL.

And they trigger some final safety mechanism in your brain, some last-ditch reflexive effort to keep you tethered to the world you’ve always known, personified by a sudden droning hum and a light that grows quickly to brilliance, drowning out everything. Perfect, brilliant, blazing light, all-encompassing, that shoves your consciousness higher like a life jacket dragging a drowning man to the surface of a lake, until your eyes finally snap open and you are in your bed – of course, you’ve always been in your bed, you were just dreaming, that’s all – and the drone is the hum of the air purifier you turned on last night because they cats were being noisy and the light was just dawn’s gentle press from behind your sheer curtains.

You know those nights?

Yeah, me too.

So how did you sleep?