Gazing Into the Abyss

ACCORDING TO THE FBI, which, despite the president's claims to the contrary, is highly reliable, the greatest terroristic threat to the United States is white supremacism. White supremacism emerges obviously, from within the European-american community, rather than the African-american or Islamic-Arab community. More broadly, it emerges from within the conservative Christian community. To verify this, interview a meaningful number of avowed white supremacists. They disproportionately, overwhelmingly self identify as Christian, conservative, and patriotic. White supremacy ideology is a traditional, conservative value, unshared by the liberal progressive community, which prefers to advocate for equality for minorities, including blacks, LGBTQ folk, and the usual groups, all well known. A cursory examination of the most horrific mass murders inside the United States and elsewhere reveals angry young white males, giving credit to Donald Trump for their inspiration. Islamic terrorists rarely if ever do damage inside American borders, and they seem to be in very short supply, indeed nonexistent, inside the United States. White supremacists, however, are ubiquitous. They are our neighbors, our coworkers, they attend our churches, and the infiltrate the American military and police departments all across the fruited plain. This is a fact, not rumor, slander, nor propaganda. The most threatening and demonstrably damaging organized terrorism in America emerges, renewed again and again as new generations come of age, fro within the very bosom of mainstream American society, the very foundation of American culture, from among the people who are the most venerated, widely regarded as America's most virtuous, upheld as paragons of American goodness. We the American people are reluctant, if not altogether unwilling to confront this fact. To verify it, merely talk to the FBI. The only resistance is to claim that the FBI has been infiltrated and captured by hordes of left wing agitators, which doubtless many conservatives, after the fashion of president Trump, will stoop to do. Human hatred of other groups is as old as paleolithic society, an expedient, like most human behavior, to survival. In modern times it has become an infinite, dark abyss into which endless energy, resources, and human life are thrown and wasted. Nietzsche wrote: 'if thous gaze long into the abyss, the abyss will gaze into thee". We Americans have a marked propensity for looking elsewhere for solutions to our problems than where they actually lie. We have a distinct preference for fantasy, a preference to escape into fabricated realities to confronting the realities within and surrounding ourselves. "Know thyself" said Socrates. "Know thyself? if I knew myself, I would probably run away" said Goethe. And so we run away. The time may be rapidly approaching, however, when we must choose whether to confront the monsters within ourselves, or to sink irretrievably into the abyss of our own manufacture.