One Bullet Away

By Joseph Rittenhouse

Sedona, AZ — There’s a storm cloud coiling over America, and most don’t see it yet. But it’s there. Dark. Imminent. Unavoidable. Call it fate, call it consequence—but don’t call it fiction. The divide is real. And it’s calcifying by the hour.

The population is more firmly divided every single day, and the walls between Americans who believe in the present administration and those who don’t are now insurmountable.

On the right, cruelty in its purest form is now an acceptable aspect of reality.

The public supporting the actions of the administration—the raids, the inhuman incarcerations, the breakup of families, the annihilation of the American dream for so many undocumented people—are entrenched now.

They firmly believe our country has been and is being invaded by these undocumented people of color and will, at this point, support even the shooting of demonstrators that break the law, one could bet.

Those who see those actions by the authorities as authoritarian and a prelude to a dictatorship unlike any gone before are helpless.

They can demonstrate and protest all they want, but the authorities are taking names and addresses, building detention centers everywhere, and are preparing to jail, silence, and punish those who raise their voices against the coming golpe the authorities are getting ready to unleash.

It will be a shot heard around the world when the first bullet fired by a protestor that kills an agent is followed by a fusillade of death—a fusillade that will mow down the protestors and demonstrators where they stand.

This will start the civil war everyone has been predicting now for decades.

Only it won’t be much of a war, because the actions of the authorities are backed by more than 50 percent of Americans, as noted in by the last election—and by the staunch support of almost every elected official.

This won’t be a civil war like the last. It won’t be fields and flags. It will be hashtags and handcuffs. Drones and datapoints. The enemies of the state will be bloggers. Activists. Teachers. Journalists. Anyone who dares to speak when silence is the rule.

The rebels will be identified, caught, jailed, silenced or killed.

The same goes for the so-called press and even social media. It will be deemed unpatriotic to criticize the administration when it is in the middle of a civil war tearing the entire country to pieces, as it will claim, to justify the silencing and annihilation of anyone or any group that dares to speak out.

The press will be painted as subversive. The platforms we trusted to speak freely will be sanitized into echo chambers. And law enforcement—already told to defend themselves by any means necessary—will be given one more unspoken permission: Pull the trigger!

The administration has given the green light to law enforcement to protect themselves from the violent protestors by any means necessary.

Those charged with protecting the public will be only doing their jobs, pawns as well to the machinations of the string pullers.

We all know what that green light means. — those of us of astute and clear minds. Sooner or later a law enforcement officer will unfortunately be killed by a rioter. An order will be given. And the shootings, in earnest, begin.

Think about it. We are but one bullet away from the America we once knew, now, forever gone.