By Jock Mulligan
The air is heavy with the scent of scorched earth and the pride of a man who thinks he is a god and we are looking at a powderkeg with the fuse already spluttering and the men holding the matches are wearing the badges of the federal department. They are heading straight for a calamity that will make the fire at the ranch in Texas look like a Sunday bonfire and we are watching the slow march toward a Waco that will tear the very heart out of the country.
There is an odd twist to this tale that would make a scholar of the old world weep for in the old days the cultists were the ones hiding in the cellar waiting for the end of the world but today the cultists are the ones with the guns and the government lorries. They are huddling around the master in a fever of devotion worshipping a leader who sees the law as nothing more than a toy for his own spite and these raiders of the department are not serving a constitution they are serving a man and that is the most dangerous kind of soldier you can find.
They move with the arrogance of the fascist and they think they are untouchable but America is a tinderbox and they are kicking sparks into the dry grass and we have seen the shambles they have made already. On the seventh of January they shot Renée Good dead in her car while she was steering away from them and then on the twenty-fourth they murdered Alex Pretti an ICU nurse who was only filming their villainy and helping a woman they had shoved to the ground. They say he was a threat but the film shows him disarmed and on the cobbles when the lead was flying.
We have seen the other sparks too like the tear gas canister they threw that rolled under a family’s car and left a six month old baby gasping for its life and the pepper balls they fire into crowds in Powderhorn Park just for the sport of it. The list of the injured and the life-worn is growing long and the anger is bubbling up in the dark corners of every city. It is only a matter of time before these men attempt a raid in a place that will not be bullied and they will descend on a house or a church or a community centre with their usual heavy-handed villainy and they will find a people who have had their fill of being hunted. There will be a standoff and there will be the loud hailers and the armoured lorries and then because they know no other way but the way of the fist there will be an exchange of fire and once that first shot is rang out the whole country could go up in a sheet of flame.
The pity of it all is the response from the ones who should be standing in the gap for the Biden crowd and the politicians in the capital have been as feeble as a wet rag. They sit in their offices looking patronising and supercilious as if a polite letter or a tut-tut in the press will stop a bullet and they talk of norms and they talk of procedures while the men with the badges are busy liquidating the peace of the land. Their pressure has been a mockery of leadership and their silence is a permission for the mayhem to continue.
If the politicians do not step up and put a leash on these federal raiders then the world’s biggest economy will fall into a state of murder and madness for you cannot run a shop or a bank or a school in a land where the civil war is simmering on every street corner. The moneyed disruptors might think they can profit from the chaos but they will find that the fire burns the boardroom just as easily as the slum. We need a moral law and we need it now and we need the politicians to find their backbone and remove the men who are inciting this violence before the standoff begins for a house on fire is no place for any man to bide.
Jock Mulligan uses ai to help with grammar and punctuation. The illustrative picture is ai generated.
