This isn't the country we grew up in, for the most part. Especially not the urban areas. I tended to crow a little bit about this little patch of rural Kentucky that I recently moved into,..because for me,...it was rediscovering America. I had been away from it for a long, long time. I had forgotten how good it is and I couldn't help reveling in being a part of it again.
But even this won't last. The suburbs are working their way out here. I won't live to see it. But the people who occupy this area will be pushed out in about 20 years.
I don't know where it's going to go.
I'd like to think that people will wise up and rise up. But Russia got beaten down in the same way that America is today,..and they didn't see it until it was done.
I think of this passage often:
“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn , The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956
