Sometimes it is good to take a big step back and reflect.  This is definitely true now for Americans, even though you won't like what it brings.  And I think the clock is ticking.

Let's reflect upon what has gone down since Trump has left office:

1. The price of fuel (for your car but also just to stay both warm and cool) has doubled and looks to go higher.

2. The prices of food and many other staples have gone up over 40% and are likely going higher.

3. Your wages have likely gone up one to four percent if you're lucky.

4. Your standard of living just took a serious hit if you are making less than $100,000 per year.

5. Your retirement and other savings are heading south and picking up speed.

These five items make me think the Biden Cabal really is out to skewer those Americans making less than $100,000 a year (you know, the ones they constantly swear they're for).  It's incredible, but the White House and Democrats are showing an almost obscene disregard for these people.  Let's stare at it!  It is mind-numbingly outrageous.  It is excruciatingly more so because it is so easily remedied: unleash American energy.  But they won't do it.

In a society where the leadership is supposed to depend on the electorate to keep it in office, this is stupefying.  Recent comments from them, such as "drive a Tesla," make it astoundingly more so.  In a sane society, politicians who act like this don't risk being voted from office.  Historically, they have risked Mussolini's fate!  And yet our overlords seem blithely uncaring.  It is remarkable, or, more precisely, it is remarkably sinister.

Image: Flag by vectorpocket (Freepik license) and Minneapolis during the George Floyd riots (YouTube screen grab).

Let's keep reflecting:

1. The Democrats' recent recourse is to ask our avowed enemies (Iran, Venezuela) to remedy the U.S. energy situation.  That's not exactly treason, but it does seem to rhyme, doesn't it?

2. We are coming off a year where the party in power has mandated that you must be injected with an as yet experimental drug (of debatable efficacy) or lose your job/livelihood.  All for the common good.  Disregarding (for now) "My Body, My Choice," they have seemingly shredded the Constitution here.  I rolled up my sleeve voluntarily, but to force people?  Really?  Land of the free?  Isn't this the country that authored the Bill of Rights?

3. During a pandemic that killed over 6 million worldwide, this administration essentially scrapped the Bill of Rights for its own citizens, and yet it allowed millions of untested, unvaccinated illegal aliens to flood into the country.  In what corner of the galaxy does this make even remote sense?  Follow the science?  Really?

4. Regarding that experimental vaccine, the Cabal shows an incredible disregard for exactly how the virus that killed over 6 million worldwide actually came about.  It appears that might be to protect certain elements of the Deep State (e.g., Anthony Fauci) and/or not offend this country's singularly greatest foreign enemy (i.e., China).  So the single greatest disease disaster in any of our lifetimes goes unaddressed in terms of who brought it about?  And we do what?

5. In the wake of the Ukraine disaster (which follows on the Afghanistan disaster), there appears to be little to no action to avoid the next military disaster — Taiwan — as no massive defensive buildup of a key ally (think Taiwan Semiconductor, if you don't care for the moral element here) is occurring.  (Oh, and the next military disaster might occur with tens of thousands of casualties of U.S. military — at sea and on land — a military that has been focused, by the way, more on diversity than ballistics.  An epochal military defeat could truly be on our horizon.)  Do you have any family on active military duty?  Their lives may soon be as forfeit as the 13 we so disgracefully lost in Kabul.

6. The national debt of our country — our debt — has ballooned to over 30 trillion during this administration.  That is almost $100,000 for every U.S. citizen!  Exactly how do you think that is ever going to be repaid and is not going to affect your children's — or your own — quality of life?

7. The murder rate in every major American city is spiraling upward, as are carjackings and rapes, as Democrat mayors and D.A.s smile and preen and moralize.  Lately, freight trains get ransacked, and downtown department stores get robbed by roving packs.  This will shift from the evening news to directly impact your extended and possibly immediate family in the next two years.  It is guaranteed.  Are you emotionally ready?

8. Your children are being taught in public schools — the ones you pay for — to hate themselves (and you) if they happen to be white and assume victimhood if they aren't.  Now, there's a recipe for future racial harmony in the U.S.

If Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin were in actual control of the U.S. — its government, its media, its education — he would be ordering exactly what is described above.  Is one of them truly in control?  If not, who/what exactly is doing so that could be that level of bad?  Will we ever know?

We have all taken the blue pill of the Matrix for far too long.  We have gone along to get along, and now we have what we have deserved.  But do the children being born today deserve that (by which I mean those who get to be born)?

My wife often chides me for being too strident.  I asked her the other day if Mrs. Revere should have given Paul Revere the same admonition.  If she had, and succeeded, would my wife now have a framed picture of the queen in our living room?  Or if Mrs. Lincoln had chided Abraham to be more likable, might we currently need a passport to travel from Pennsylvania to Virginia?

I really don't know what it will take to turn the U.S. around or if it is too far gone.  I know this: without the sense of outrage and steel that Americans marshaled at Lexington/Concord, Pearl Harbor, Guadalcanal, and Midway, and in the first days after 9/11, we will lose what we have, and once lost, our children will never get it back.  Now, there is a legacy.