Seen One Seen Em All

 The Proud Boys.

El Shabab.

The Oath Keepers.

Countless other heavily armed militias living in the American forests.

Islamic State.

Taliban.

There are many, many more; they pop up constantly as needed.

Except for the accidents of birth which place these individuals in their particular time and space they are at root the same thing: nihilistic losers in a world in which they can't succeed or compete.

Their solution to their self generated plight is uniformly the same: mayhem, death, destruction and a return to a non-existent "other time when things were good; when men could be men, and women knew better than to get in the way".

That's a rather synthetic description of the genre, but it gets the job done.

It gives the explanatory backdrop to the never ending video clips of masses of women, children and a few men huddling in the misery of collapsed societies: parts of Kenya, all of Somalia, intermittently in Iraq, totally always now in Syria, recently beginning in Mozambique, and so on and so forth ad infinitum.

The confluence of all those "movements" with their constantly-being-documented results, daily fare wherever one gets one's video content, always brings me to a question.

"We have more than enough of the nihilistic nut crowd, in our military, in our police, in our woods, hills, dales and - probably - caves - to do the job; what makes America different? What keeps those factions from bringing us to the misery and chaos that reigns supreme in so many other places?"

I always breathe and heave a sigh of relief.

That can't happen here because we are a nation of laws.

We are governed by dependable representatives of the people dedicated to, above all, the universal well being, safety and success of the people; those representatives have taken an oath to uphold and defend the compact that is the basis of we the people; unlike those "other places" we have an impenetrable buffer, proven and tested by time and tide, between us and catastrophes such as are experienced elsewhere; we are Americans.

The feeling of tranquility is short lived; when I remember that almost half of those members of the buffer are republicans; and that most of them live in the world of the militias; and that if Jim Jordan is representative of the species, our days of being free from complete implosion are limited.

But we had a good deal going there for a couple of hundred years.