Gold & Silver Forum - An open letter to the revolutionaries

http://willsmentaldebris.blogspot.co...tionaries.html

Who wants a civil war in America?

After reading one too many posts on Reddit and Digg about this, I feel forced to respond. This is an open letter to all the idealistic nitwits who have lately been calling for an armed revolt or musing about the possibility of an armed overthrow of the United States government. It seems to me that you have mistaken a general distaste with low-grade tyranny to mean that the people are ready for revolt. Further, you seem to be under the deeply mistaken impression that the world will be a better place if we were to all rise up against the government we have, perhaps instituting one more to (y)our liking. Because several have seemingly already bought into this delusion, perhaps we should explore what such an action will eventually cost.

1) The death of your comfortable life. You will not have your XM radio, your nice comfortable house in the suburbs, your cushy job in an air conditioned office, your coffee shop, your video games or probably even most of what you need to survive. You will not have a comfortable, safe anything. If your house doesn't end up being a mangled pile of broken rubble with your family decomposing under the burned bricks, you will live on the run. Do you really think the "bad" parts of town will stay contained without the police force? Do you think the river that your city probably sits on will stay in its bounds? How long before a natural disaster, a rainstorm, a heat wave, a hurricane, or just some moron managing to start a fire?
2) You will watch people you care about die, probably a lot of them. You think you are going to get out, run to the hills and play "My Side of the Mountain" until it all calms down with no consequences? Think again. The cities will be full of scoundrels with no one to keep them in check. The countryside will be full of people fleeing the city. That's right. If you live in a major city, you will be swarming out into the countryside with tens or hundreds of thousands of other people, trying to live off of land that won't support you. The people there won't want you around and will be desperate trying to survive. If you are unlucky enough to be one of the people outside of town, you will have to spend your every waking hour in a living hell of trying to keep people out of your house. How many people would it take to provide suitable defensive fire for your house in a survival situation? I would need at least six and I have a small house. How many for the average McMansion? No, hell will open its jaws and drag you off into the night.
3) You will watch someone you care about die horribly. Maybe they'll be diabetic and won't be able to get their insulin. Maybe they will be burned alive by incendiary bombs or buried in rubble while they are still alive, the cold stone slowly smothering their panic and cooling them to ambient temperature. Maybe your wife or your daughter (or you, for that matter) will be raped until they have fistulas and then die slowly from sepsis. Regardless, you will either know they suffered it, watch them suffer it, already be dead, or you will never really know what happened to them.
4) You will not have a democracy (or likely freedom at all) afterward. Democracies do not fall to make way for more democracy - they become tyranny. Always. You cannot escape from the curse of history more than any other people at any other time. Prepare to never be listened to by your government again. Prepare for internment; prepare for the firing squad. It will not be like V for Vendetta. Your children's children may be free again, but you probably won't see it in your lifetime.
5) You will not have glory. This will not be the battle of Thermopylae. It won't even be the Battle of the Bulge. It will be the Somme. You will not be Leonidas. You will not be Patton. You will be a nameless, faceless corpse in a mass grave, a prisoner of war. You will lose your mind; you will lose your limbs. Your manhood will be shorn from your crotch like a peach being plucked from a tree. You will be blind - you will carry metal in your body for the rest of your life. You will carry memories of watching a shell hit your friend and turn him into red mist and fire. Maybe you will be impaled by pieces of what's left of him.
6) You will never again be wealthy. It will be a ruin. It will not be like the Great Depression, where a weakened nation turned by force of will from poverty. It will be like the fall of the Maya in the jungle. There will be little to no memory of who you were, other than what ruins can tell and survivors can remember. It won't easily come to mind for you after a while - it'll seem like the dim dream of another lifetime.
7) Your nation will never be strong again. You can pretty much count on Alaska getting annexed by Russia. Hawaii and our other island territories will be cut off. There is no guessing about what will happen to the mainland - it will be a buffet for whoever wants it. No government will emerge from such a struggle that can control as much land area as ours does. We will shatter like a antique vase rolling down a flight of concrete stairs - and like the vase, we will never be in one piece again. The U.N. will write a strongly worded letter - maybe in 20 or 30 years they'll send someone to check on us and take pictures. You think Somalia is bad? Try being in a city of several million people who have never known real hardship and have no survival instincts when everything that makes the city possible collapses. Somalia is a polite party compared to what we'll be getting.
8) You will not save the earth. With a humanitarian crisis, a (probable) health crisis, a disruption of the supply of food, materials and medicine and general anarchy, no one will care about field mice, eagles, trees or any other part of nature. We will become like our ape ancestors, scrambling to try to survive. Every bit of nature not yet bent to the will of humanity will become so. Every park and every open space will be packed full of people and their waste.
9) You will not have your religion. The churches, mosques, synagogues, and temples will be overrun, either by armed forces wishing to take shelter, or refugees. It won't be safe to travel. If you are in a majority religious group, most of your stuff will probably be stolen and lots of your people killed. Many of the rest will have their faith utterly shattered. If you are in a minority religious group, you'll face the same, with the additional fun possibility of a lynch mob.
10) You will not have your children's innocence. They too, will see death, maybe experience it. They might even be forced to fight and have to bring it to someone else. Few things in war are as horrible as what it does to children who have no other choice.

This is fair warning to everyone advocating this. If you do this, you better have good reason, because you are pulling the mountains down on your own head. Even talking about this in casual conversation around the water cooler is dangerous. It's easy to talk yourself into a situation that you can't get out of even with good advance planning and heavy firepower. Don't think that you can pull yourself out of this one just because you read Sun Tzu 10 years ago on a business trip. This will not come out like a movie. Iraq is the mere antechamber to true horror. Do not open this door lightly.