A life changing event

[colorado thinker]

When I was about 13, my mother brought home a paperback by Taylor Caldwell, "The Devil's Advocate". The story was about America governed by a totalitarian regime. The premise was that this evil government came into power by assuring the people that only the government could keep them safe. They gained control by taking away the peoples' rights and freedoms one by one, slowly and with slogans and patriotic songs, so that the people never realized what was happening.

A small group of protesters, an underground resistance, tried to fight, but were growing discouraged. However, the most evil of the government men escalated his oppression of the people until finally the populace revolted. At the end, right before the oppressor was killed, he revealed that he, too, was a resistance fighter who realized that the only way to wake the people up was to make them so miserable they would revolt. The Devil's Advocate. This book was written in 1956 or 1957.

I still have this book and have read it many times over the years, but foolishly believed that this was only fiction, that it would never happen in real America, that the people would see what was happening and recognize the fascism early. I was wrong. And I begin to believe that the only way to wake up the average American is to oppress him to the point of revolt.

How sad that we lost sight of this potential catastrophe, that we lost the knowledge learned during Hitler and Mussolini's regimes, that we could be so distracted by "things" that we have willingly gone along with their plan. We're educated but not wise; sophisticated, but naive.

And I'm afraid.

[Arugula Latte]

1. For another scary picture of a totalitarian U.S. regime, read

"The Handmaid's Tale" by Margaret Atwood. That is the theocratic nightmare that seems ever closer...