The Water is Rising

Shuffling among news feeds … Hurricane Laura … Kenosha … Portland … Police murder Black Americans … Accounts of the RNC … COVID-19 updates … Landfall at 1:00 am CST … State police in Minneapolis … White supremacist murders protesters … Eyewall winds at 150 mph … Twitter: Feds in Kenosha, snatching people off the streets … 20 foot wall of water … The ocean 30 miles inland … Nearly 180,000 dead from a virus … Catastrophic …

Here be monsters … Dystopian fantasies are now fears … 2020 Plague Year … Annus horribilis …

I studied medieval England in grad school. I often wondered how ordinary people survived. Poor diets, isolation, and disease were commonplace; life expectancy short. Oppression by local nobles, the Church, and the King’s taxman.

Then they would come.

All of them.

Conquest, Famine, War, and Death — the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, joined by Plague. Fifty percent of the population died because of the plague — entire villages depopulated. Children without parents, fields without farmers, markets without traders.

It’s difficult to imagine what the survivors thought or how they felt. Some of them certainly went insane. And the cycle repeated for hundreds of years.

So, yes, it can get worse, unimaginably worse. If you’re just waiting to vote, hoping things will be quiet until November, you may be waiting in vain. Like the people of Louisiana waiting for Hurricane Laura, if you don’t leave before the wall of water rises twenty feet high, you aren’t going to … Well, then it’s between you and God.

The water is rising in America. You need to find a way to resist now.