If you don’t already know it, we’re under siege.
How people handle this in open warfare should be instructive to us living lives of quiet desperation (Thoreau) often all alone, except for our communications with one another via email and favorite like-minded news and blog sites.
People under siege hunker down, probing their besiegers perimeters looking for a spot in which they can break out. Or, they await relief. You know, when the cavalry shows up in the last scene as they did in ninety-five percent of all the B-Westerns we watched at the matinee on Saturday.
The besiegers have an advantage because they just have to wait for someone to make a mistake, to strike out, so they can take them down one by one.
You may have heard of Lord Baden-Powell. Most Boy Scouts have, for he was one of the founders of the Boy Scout movement. But in the 1890s he was the British commander of the Army garrison at Mafeking in northern South Africa. It was a large garrison, so, in military parlance, was an “accompanied tour,” many of the officers and men’s wives joining them. Away from the main fighting, the Afrikaaner Boers hoped to either take Mafeking or keep its troops from breaking out to assist British Forces in the south.
It was under siege for over 200 days, after skirmishes that proved to the Boers they could not take the garrison by force.
After seven months, the Boers were defeated in the south, the besiegers drifted away and Baden-Powell returned to England a hero, and awarded the Victoria Cross.
Why?
Because, besides keeping a tight defensive perimeter around Mafeking, he kept morale high. To accomplish this one thing he did some very ungeneral-like things, especially for an English officer. He organized plays and shows. He was seen daily walking among the people, chatting and laughing, keeping spirits high. Again, very ungeneral-like things.
That’s all there was? Yep. Baden-Powell recognized the new mission as being one not in the general’s handbook, adjusted for it and proceeded.
As we will discuss in the coming weeks of the weeding out process of the early primaries, we need to keep in mind that Barack Obama has a billion dollars, and the GOP establishment has several million, almost all of which will be targeted at suppressing conservative votes next November. I can assure you that except for some new dead people voting, and the kids who were fourteen when he was elected, and whose parents haven’t lost their jobs, Obama will find no new voters, just as he has found no new jobs in the trillion or so he’s squandered on stimulus.
Instead, just as he has jimmied unemployment figures by reducing the total labor pool by several million, he will try to win the election by depressing the total voter pool, by, 1) making us gloomy and filled with despair, 2), by splitting our vote into third parties, and finally, come next summer, 3) physically threatening us.(They will be in for a surprise.)
So keep the faith.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPL7nN99jno
And until then, keep on the sunny side.
