BLM Invades Paradise

I have been to my first Black Lives Matter protest.

I drove to Ocala today to get some shelves and to see if it was true that there was a protest. Things looked normal until I reached a certain point on State Road 200, which is the city’s main artery. I saw flashing lights, and traffic slowed down. Then I saw police vehicles parked in the street. Then I saw the marchers. Then I heard the screaming.

I would guess there were 400 marchers, and that’s a large number for a small conservative town. There were a few white marchers, but the vast majority were black. They were marching down the center of the road.

It was a peaceful protest, but “peaceful” is a deceptive term. It just means I saw no vandalism or violence. It doesn’t mean “peaceful” in the usual sense of the term. If people were sitting at your dinner table yelling at the top of their lungs with angry expressions on their faces, you wouldn’t say you were having a peaceful evening.

I heard a lot of cars honking. I thought it was coming from people who were angry at the protesters, but then I saw signs saying people should honk in support.

I got stuck in a group of cars that were moving very slowly. Part of the time, this made sense, because there were pedestrians ahead, and the cops were directing traffic. When the pedestrians were no longer in the way and the cops had moved, traffic still moved slowly. Why? Then I looked into the cars around me. Many were being driven by blacks and Hispanics. Some were holding smartphones to film the marchers.

Here is what a cynical person would say: the organizers knew they wouldn’t get a lot of support in Marion County, so they had some of the protesters drive instead of walking. They were instructed to move slowly and obstruct traffic, and to blow their horns to make the march seem more popular.

Call me a cynic.

This is the most conservative county in Florida. You can’t be elected dogcatcher here if you’re not a Republican. Trump signs are everywhere. Yet most drivers support BLM? No.

I saw some people who had come out of businesses, waving in support. That surprised me. Then I looked closer and realized that the ones who appeared white at first actually had olive skin and black hair.

Some marchers had signs advertising the Bridges Project. When I got home, I looked it up. It’s an organization which says its mission is to help blacks and whites get along. Oddly, nearly all of the officers are white. Their site brags that they got Confederate flags removed from certain places.

I do not have any Confederate flags. I had a couple of items with Confederate flags on them, and they had a lot of sentimental value to me, but I got rid of them many years ago, thinking it might be considered tasteless to appear to support the Confederacy. Nonetheless, I take a dim view of the sudden, manufactured flag hysteria that materialized out of nowhere a few years back. One year, no one cared, and the next year, you could literally have a problem for owning Dukes of Hazzard memorabilia. There were a lot of black people who wore Confederate flags because they saw it as a way of celebrating their Southern culture, but even they had to get rid of them.

I am not favorably impressed by any organization that bought into and fed the hysteria, and anyone who wants to have a Confederate tag on his car or a flag on his hat should be allowed to do so without being accused of racism. It’s possible, and healthy, for the meaning of a symbol to change.

I started thinking about what I was seeing at the protest, and I asked God to tell me what to conclude.

First, police brutality is real, and bad, and more likely to be a problem for you if you’re black.

Second, it’s important to fight injustice. Protesting is a legitimate way of doing that.

Those things are obvious.

Here’s where it gets complex. What if you’re fighting a problem we can’t do much more to fix, and in doing so, you do a lot of damage to your country?

We are not going to get rid of police brutality, because this is a very big country, we have thousands and thousands of cops, and we do not have an extremely effective way to screen or control them. We have tools that are limited in their effect. The job attracts bullies, and it always will, and they will never stop getting past the barriers.

The police will continue to murder people occasionally, and some of those people–the minority, if you check the facts–will not be white. These killings will sometimes make the news. It’s not going to stop, even if BLM gets everything it wants. This is undeniable. Instead of reacting to every killing as though it were utterly intolerable to go one more day without a magical cure, we should be asking ourselves what level of damage we have to accept.

We hate traffic deaths, but we don’t consider 40,000 per year to be indicative of a protest requiring street protests. We hate murders committed by civilians, but we aren’t out in the streets over the 16,000 or so that take place every year. More than half of those murders are committed by black people, according to the FBI, and black murderers generally kill other black people, but we don’t see a lot of marchers or signs. Abortion is murder, but there are very few protests over the million or so babies we rip apart every year.

Sometimes we accept the fact that we can’t do much better than we already are without consequences that make the cure worse than the problem.

Putting an end to police murders is not something that can be done abruptly. I can tell you with great assurance that very few protesters are aware of this or would try to understand it if you told them. They want a quick fix. In reality, the best we can do is to improve things incrementally as we come up with new strategies. That takes time, and it will never get us to the zero-murder point.

There isn’t that much that can be done in a hurry, but the protest movement can do a lot of harm. For one thing, it stimulates anti-white racism, which is a huge problem in America. There are many places whites simply cannot go. It’s known. It’s accepted. We don’t need to see the problem exacerbated.

The movement also fuels leftist political campaigns, and leftism is evil. It’s based on class hatred, racism, and envy. It’s based largely on ignorance. Leftist politicians convince voters who cause their own poverty that a cabal of whites–especially Jews–are sitting on a mythical pile of gold somewhere, and that all poverty can be erased if the politicians take it and pass it out. In reality, most poor people will remain poor no matter how much they’re given because they have bad habits. No matter what we do with wealth, it will tend to end up in the same hands over and over.

Leftism destroys initiative, and when it gets bad enough, it drives productive people to emigrate. It leads to totalitarianism, political imprisonment, and often, mass murder. But the average voter who can’t get past minimum wage doesn’t want to, and therefore will not, hear that.

The movement is also likely to drive the police to underenforce. Underenforcement is already a problem in many places. Black neighborhoods are notorious for it. The police don’t like to go in. The citizens don’t like to cooperate. There are many, many black people who can kill just about anyone they want in broad daylight in front of witnesses, because they know nothing will happen. On Martin Luther King Day in Miami, black people who have grudges go out and hurt their enemies because they know the police give up on that day.

How do I know this? Honest black people told me.

What if underenforcement becomes a problem everywhere? We tend to think of police work as a calling, but in reality, it’s just a job. There is a limit to what a person will do for a paycheck. If we’re going to charge innocent officers, drive them out of cities, and terrorize their families, just because they were involved in the deaths of suspects, should we expect good cops to continue taking the risks without which they can’t do their jobs effectively?

The movement teaches minorities to stop growing and improving. It teaches them nothing that happens to them is their fault. That’s exactly the opposite of what they need. The more you examine yourself and make corrections, the more successful you are likely to be. The victimhood mindset is poisonous. It teaches you that other people are villains and that every evil thing you do to them is justified. It’s why Pol Pot was able to convince ordinary people to line innocent individuals up beside ditches and machine-gun them.

Leftism is always about killing the goose that lays the eggs. It’s never about becoming your own goose.

I was thinking about this today, and I started thinking about the American Revolution. No one ever says this country was founded by leftists, but it was. Maybe the chickens are coming home to roost. Maybe the revolution was evil.

The Bible makes it pretty clear that God originally wanted man to be ruled by God himself. After that became impossible, he settled for priests and prophets. After that, he permitted the Jews to have a king, even though he advised them against it and made it clear it was not his will.

Every step away from the type of government God wanted brought heavy curses.

There is nothing in the Bible that supports the next step, which is the step to democracy. In fact, when people in the Bible voted, they generally voted for evil. The Beast speaks through the will of crowds.

King George III wasn’t just a king. He was the leader of the Church of England, and it was believed that he and other kings were anointed by God. It was believed that rebellion against a king was rebellion against God himself. The term “leftist” comes from the democratic rebellions of that era. Maybe the belief that democracy was rebellion against God was correct. Maybe we did the wrong thing.

We rioted a bit ourselves. Remember the Boston Tea Party? It is said that there was no violence, but there was certainly vandalism, to the tune of seven figures in today’s money.

Think of this. Slavery would have ended in America much sooner had we not rebelled. Slavery in England was gone by about 1800. What about the Civil War, which took place only about 80 years after the War of Independence? America lost over 200,000 men. Would that have happened under the crown, with no slavery permitted? Then there’s the War of 1812. Never would have happened.

What about the world wars? Would the Germans have been so aggressive toward an England which controlled the American industrial system? Maybe they would tried to make agreements instead of striving to conquer the British Isles. England would have been an incredibly powerful country.

Maybe we cursed ourselves by founding a leftist nation. Maybe the schisms we are seeing today had their supernatural beginnings as cracks during our revolution.

I suspect that the peaceful people I saw today were only peaceful because they were few in number. I think that if there had been two or three times as many, we would have seen their true hearts. This is how human nature works. You kiss the ring when you’re weak, and you deliver kicks in the teeth when you’re strong. They looked very angry to me. Nothing like the polite, cheerful conservative protesters I’ve seen outside abortion mills.

What do I take away from this? Is God showing me this place isn’t far enough from the Beast’s militia? I have to find out.

It’s so weird that society is going through so much turmoil while I’m ratcheting up my firearms hobby. I’ve been thinking I might visit a local AR-15 manufacturer and pick one up. I was considering going tomorrow. Does that look bad?

There are a bunch of deluded conservatives who think the AR-15 will save them from the left. I don’t see it that way. I don’t even think it’s a great weapon. I think it’s a very flawed weapon, and part of the appeal for enthusiasts, whether they admit it to themselves or not, is working hard to make it function corrrectly. I have bulletproof, 100% reliable Eastern bloc rifles for protection. I think it would be fun to have an AR-15 for varmints, and I think I would enjoy learning about it and reloading for it, but I have yet to be convinced that it’s a great weapon.

It reminds me of the Porsche 911. Porsche came up with an extremely flawed design around 70 years ago, and instead of admitting it and moving on, they modify it and release a new version every year. Meanwhile companies like McLaren make cars that drive rings–or Nurburgrings–around it.

“Conservative Christian Blogger Threatens to Buy Assault Weapon in Response to Peaceful Protest.” No. When you have to start shooting fellow citizens in order to hold onto your country, you no longer have a country worth living in.

I have been thinking Tennessee might be a lot safer than Florida, but today I had a disturbing thought. What happens when leftists take over, if they manage to open the borders? That could actually happen. We’re nearly there now.

Right now, conservatives win a lot of elections, and there are areas where they outnumber leftists. What if people are allowed to pour in without limitation? We could see literally millions of legal hostile immigrants over a period of months. They would need land and houses. They could flood the lifeboat in a hurry, including places that used to seem safe.

I tend to think of America as a stable country, but in reality, anything can happen when irrational people are in charge. Maybe the ground I think of as solid is actually very thin ice, ready to snap unexpectedly.

Here’s a term engineers use: brittle failure. It describes an event in which a structure breaks without warning, with extreme speed. Think of bending a glass rod until it breaks. Maybe America is headed for a brittle failure instead of a gradual decline. It happened a lot in the Bible. Israel had several brittle failures. It’s what happens when you neglect God and feed demons. On the surface, things look good, but underneath, the structure has been removed.

Samson had a brittle failure. Belshazzar had a brittle failure. The Assyrian besiegers who were massacred by angels had a brittle failure. The flood, the burning of Sodom, the destruction of Satan’s kingdom on the cross, the fall of Jericho. It’s a repeating theme. Israel had the opposite of a brittle failure when God created it in one day. Maybe my country will fall in a brittle failure.

And here I am, just a man, unable to figure out the truth. I can’t predict anything.

I was very unhappy to see the protest today. I never thought it could happen here. It’s like Nazis marching in Skokie, a suburb where Jews thought they were safe. I have to pray about this.

Hope I won’t be on Earth when the real fun starts.