The Reason For My Paranoia

“Every man always has handy a dozen glib little reasons why his is right not to sacrifice himself….As for me , I kept silent for one further reason: because those Muscovites thronging the steps of the escalators were too few for me, too few! Here my cry would be heard by 200 or twice 200, but what about the 200 million? Vaguely, unclearly, I had a vision that someday I would cry out to the 200 million.”---Alekandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

There is one key reason for my paranoia. Of the forty books on World Magazine’s Top 40 Books of the 20th Century about half have to do with the failure of government when government exceeds its God-given authority. So it is no wonder that I have such difficulty with Obamacare or even with the new Core curriculum for schools. It doesn’t take any imagination to see America moving that direction (see The Life of Julia).

I’m currently reading “The Gulag Archipelago,” in which Solzhenitsyn describes the horrors of communism. Some years ago I read Manchester’s, The Last Lion—Alone, the biography of Winston Spencer Churchill. History is full of many that complacently follow their leaders into evil and ruin. However in any age there are only few voices willing to say that the prophets lie when they say, “Peace, peace when there is no peace.”

If you followed me around for a week, besides being bored, you would see little evidence of my anti-state, anti-union mentality. It is only inside my mind that I store up these grains for winter. I am fairly certain the storm is coming.

What of it? We are not to be paranoid. We are to be aware. We cannot all be the voice of a Solzhenitsyn. Yet we must be a voice.

“We have to condemn publicly the very idea that some people have the right to repress others. In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep with us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousandfold in the future.”---from The Gulag Archipelago