We are the Weak Link

At the Bottom End of Generational Decline

1993.

Days before Christmas. A week before my eleventh birthday.

I’m standing next to my grandfather at the edge of an old steel fence that seals off the pasture from the rest of his farm. Violet and magenta hues slice through a frozen sky; our sliver of planet is in the process of turning away from the sun. We’re watching his dog, Carlos, round up the horses and herd them back to the barn before night brings the harsh deep freeze that comes with these rural Alberta winters.

Thick steam billows from his nostrils and rises along the edges of his cowboy hat. He carefully observes the horses galloping toward us and quietly mumbles something about his rifles. He’s been grumbling about a long gun registry since we arrived from Vancouver a few days earlier.

“What’s the deal with this gun registry thing, anyway?” I ask in my high pitched pre-pubescent voice.

My grandad looks down at me, the cherry on his cigarette glows bright red as he takes a long pull.

I’ll never forget his response:

“Well, Chuck (his nickname for me), I pay taxes to keep the government out of my business. This is my private property and nobody needs to know what’s on it…”

Then:

“I don’t want my name on a list. If the government is keeping a list, it’s keeping one for a reason, and when shit hits the fan, they’re coming for our guns first. Property will go with it.”

My mind was far too young to grasp what he was saying, but something told me to hold onto it. I’ve carried it with me ever since.

Even in my twenties, as my naivety swept me into the shoulder height depth of the left, I always maintained a firm stance on private property and gun ownership. I would argue with equally gullible leftists for hours about the importance of maintaining those rights. I knew their perspective was shaped by their milquetoast urban experience, and in their view, guns were more of an offensive weapon than a defensive tool.

But it was my grandad’s loaded Winchester rifle that saved my grandmother’s life when a bear snuck up on her while she was gardening.

He knew history—not from books, but through lived experience—and he knew that if a Stalinist or Hitlerian figure ever came to power in Canada, his status on a long gun registry would make him an instant target—as would his occupation as a farmer. He was also aware that his shed full of rifles and handguns would be a necessary element of surprise should they ever arrive to expropriate his land.

He listened to some of the most vicious dictators the world has ever known deliver hate-filled speeches on the radio. He watched a sequence of devastating atrocities play out live on television across decades. He didn’t have the privilege of hindsight and knowing how it all would end. He lived knowing he was always in close proximity to evil—and it could arrive on his doorstep at any time.

World War II and the Cold War defined his generation. Through these experiences they gained a wisdom our generation has forgotten and is why they viewed everything through a lens of perfectly dialed skepticism. It wasn’t paranoia that was driving them—it was living through a period where the sound of jet engines overhead signaled either a commuter plane or an incoming bomb. Years of intermittent high-intensity moments sharpened their instincts.

We don’t share that experience. It wasn’t until recently that we had to consider the potential of nuclear war obliterating us and everything we know.

But if you were to dip into the currents of western society, you would never know we were slowly inching toward annihilation by intercontinental ballistic missiles. We argue on digital platforms over foreign conflicts we don’t understand. We take a position based on ideological allegiances rather than a cohesive historical knowledge of the regions we’re discussing. We’re caught in the throes of a cultural revolution we don’t even recognize because our grandparents and great grandparents afforded us the luxury of ignorance.

We’re the inheritors of greatness; trust fund kids living off the spoils of a fortune accrued through spilled blood and trench warfare. The generations that built the world around us faced depressions and starvation. Now we accuse people we disagree with of being Nazis and undergo gastric bypass surgeries because we don’t have the discipline to save ourselves from chronic obesity.

Eisenhower warned us about the world we would create. John and Robert Kennedy were assassinated when they heroically tried to stop it. In the present day, Robert’s son is the only Democratic presidential candidate even remotely qualified to usher in a course correction, but Americans won’t vote for him because his objective truth flies in the face of their subjective fantasies.

We’re now in the final phase of the western Marxification Yuri Bezmenov outlined in his classic 1984 interview. Covid-19 and climate change were the manufactured crises required to secure stage three, which naturally led us to arrive at the normalization that occurs in stage four. We’ve been conditioned to accept an existence as slaves to despotism, and trained to believe freedom is equal to fascism.

My grandfather didn’t want his name on a list. Thirty years later we find our names on a lot of lists—thousands of them; our digital thumbprints stored on servers; our personalities captured with every text message, Google search and photo sent over the internet. Our consciousness is a string of binary code that algorithms can manipulate, and a conduit for thoughts that artificial intelligence can predict long before the electrical pulses that fire between our neurons can generate them.

A rifle is a single use tool, but the human mind is a multi-dimensional weapon. A long gun registry is where it begins. Total psychological subjugation is where it ends.

These are the penultimate strides on the emerald road to tyranny.