“The best lack all conviction”

This is a rambling post, bordering on a rant in a couple of places. I wrote it mostly late last night/early this morning. I did some editing and I probably should do more, but it is what it is.

There has been much written about how things are falling apart, and people expect the start of Civil War 2.0 any time now. You can see it in the hyperbole surrounding the SCOTUS decision to not take up the Texas abortion law. In the political indoctrination in State Schools. In the Woke Military. And in more places than I can count.

I write often, and read more often, about how basic constraints of civilization of falling away. In large US cities, law and order is a thing of the past, with murders, and shootings and carjackings, and more a daily occurrence.

One of the things I am reminded of, these days, is "The Second Coming" by W. B. Yeats - Poems | Academy of American Poets

I won't quote the whole thing, but here is the section that usually gets a mention.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

That isn't even one stanza.

Recently, William A. Jacobson posted, at Legal Insurrection: Prepping for the Worst.

I have so little faith in the people running this country at various levels that stocking up on long shelf-life food and other prepper-lite protections seems to me, for the first time in my adult life, to be one of the least crazy ideas.

You might say that "innocence" is being drowned.

So someone went from "Preppers are crazy for assuming that [Fill in the blank] can happen to America; we are immune to [Fill in the blank]," to "Preppers are NOT crazy," in a relatively short period in time.

But are we really prepared for the worst? I'm not. I survived the first few weeks of the COVID lockdown without a problem, and I didn't even have to tap into my long-term supplies. And that is not the end of lockdowns. Just look at the insanity that is ruling Australia. (And I have more long-term and mid-tern supplies than I did in March of 2020.)

And I have to say that I do see that the worst are full of passionate intensity. Antifa is perfectly happy to burn as much as they can, to burn everything down. Teachers are doing their best to overturn everything about this country and replace it with Communism. The prosecutors in the big cities are on a crusade to destroy The Criminal Justice System and see anarchy reign in the streets of America.