A Few Thoughts for the Deep Breath Before the Plunge...

“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 Solzhenitsyn 

If you take nothing ore from this quote, take this…"If…if…we didn't love freedom enough…"

THE ONE AND ONLY REASON POLITICIANS, BUREAUCRATS, AND POLICEMEN WANT TO TAKE YOUR WEAPONS AWAY FROM YOU IS SO THAT THEY CAN DO THINGS TO YOU THAT THEY COULDN'T DO IF YOU STILL HAD YOUR WEAPONS. 

— L. Neil Smith

Violence is misunderstood. There's no such thing as senseless violence. All violence makes sense to someone. Nor is violence ever entirely random. The perp chose to be where he was, when he was. Not random. We say the victim was "in the wrong place at the wrong time," meaning where and when the perp was. Bad luck, but not a random event. We can't know the "when" until it's too late, but we can recognize the "where" with some reliability. There are places it's wrong to be, at any time. The principle is simple: when violence occurs, be somewhere else...

-- The Woodpile Report 

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