Ripples

Featured image by Dianne Yee. Follow the link for more of this artist’s work.

The Georgia Senate races are coming down to the wire, and it looks like the Democrats are going to split control with the Republicans, leaving Kamala Harris the deciding vote. My original prediction was wrong. I had thought the Republicans would hold one of the two seats. If, during the next two years, the Democratic Party adds seats to the Supreme Court or states to the Union to give themselves a permanent majority in the federal government and eliminate the Filibuster, don’t be surprised. In the midst of a pandemic, when people are struggling, we the people have elected a party that has actively promised higher taxes, more spending, and indefinite lockdowns. H.L. Menken was absolutely right when he said that “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and they deserve to get it good and hard.”

We’ll see what happens over the next two years. A thin majority in the House and a split Senate isn’t exactly a mandate for doing anything. The grips on power are tenuous at best for the Democrats, and the loose coalition of Anti-Trump sentiment that was held together by sheer hatred will fracture once the party figures out exactly who sits atop the pecking order, with a ton of collateral damage along the way.

It has also been said that history often rhymes. I think what we are seeing is the beginning of another dark time in this country’s history, when the chickens elected the fox to guard the henhouse, because he told them that the dog was out to get them. I will bear what needs to be borne. More taxes, more regulation, less freedom, more silence, safe speech. I will hold the flame of liberty in my heart, and close to my chest, sharing it with those open to hearing it. I will continue to fix my own finances, to address my own faults, and to do my own research.

I fully expect that at some point in my lifetime, that this country will no longer exist in the same form it is in now, and that my pessimistic presumptions that my Social Security won’t exist in the same form by the time I retire (if ever). I hope to be wrong. I really do.