What follows are the details of a dream that I had today, July 15th, 2012.

There were people everywhere throughout the facilities and grounds that surrounded it. Nobody was standing still unless it was to participate in what from any spectator’s view was a definedly serious, sober, and secretive discussion with a few other individuals. People were planning and pointing, some were giving directions, some were receiving and executing them. But there was no visible order to the movement taking place...at first. Within a half an hour, the people had managed to coalesce into what was becoming distinct teams. The small groups of huddled people had now combined into larger groups, and the hurriedness of the people who were carrying out directives was intensified and more purposeful. Having been a part of the chaos from the beginning, I can tell you exactly what was happening and why.

The philosophical divide between the people which had existed to some degree now for the past several years had widened and solidified into an impassable and uncompromisable chasm. The foundations of the beliefs and the clear vision for the future that each side embraced were not just different, they were contrary, contradictory, and the one unequivocally nullified the other. All of us having been successfully conditioned over the past several years to refrain from openly exercising our First Amendment right to express our true opinions openly, we sought out those of like mind via the small huddled masses that served as a quiet information exchange, one not easily discernible to the ears of the government that ironically had been the catalyst for all that was about to take place. By the very workings of nature itself, we sought out and found one another and in a very short time, had formed what amounted to two highly disorganized, leaderless armies. But though for a time it was indeed only our cause that was our pillar of cloud and fire which lead us onward toward the destiny we could not and wished not to escape, leaders did soon begin to rise up among us. Not of their own accord or by force, but again by our very nature taking its course as the dominant characteristics and knowledge of some was elevated to that position by those whose disposition was better suited to obey than to order. The leaders were chosen, instated, and approved by the collective subconscious of the group as a whole. I was one of those leaders. Not by my own choice nor my own ambitions, but out of necessity and love of country I silently accepted the role I was asked to fulfill and began to serve my fellow citizenry with a mind toward self-sacrifice for the good of the whole.

And so as we all moved about, checking our own individual caches of weapons and ammunition, choosing out positions we felt would best serve us tactically when the fighting began, we still were quite mingled with those our fellow citizens who held to beliefs quite opposite of our own. They were our neighbors, our fellow Americans, and though we all knew that in but a short while we would each be viewing one another through the crosshairs of scopes and the iron sights of our rifles and pistols, for the moment we were civil and courteous. We held the door open for one another out of habit, we exchanged brief and generic greetings as we passed each other, and we flashed a smile whenever it was that our glances chanced to meet. And every time we did so, and quite out of necessity, we also engaged in the exercise of dehumanizing and demonizing our fellow citizens within our mind and heart. We had to, for in a short while we would be engaged in the horrific work of destroying them! And how can a man destroy his brother whom he loves? He cannot. And so without ever having spoken of this necessity a single time among ourselves, we all on both sides began the process of exorcising the humanity of our brothers and sisters from within ourselves. I recall vividly one such moment when I first realized this was taking place. I was inspecting my rifle, a fine lever action 45/70 large bore rifle largely responsible for the near annihilation of the American Bison in the 1800s. I went through the motions several times of ejecting a round and chambering the next one, my gun being unloaded at the time. As was my way, once a round was chambered I had the rifle quickly shouldered and held pointing down range, the sights instantly lined up with my eye and placed on my target. It was during one such exercise when I was aiming at imaginary targets somewhere in the distance that my rifle accidentally became trained upon a small group of my adversaries who were standing nearby. Upon seeing me aiming menacingly towards them, they became agitated, frightened, and then angry. Instinctively I lowered my gun and assured them apologetically that the gun was not loaded and I was merely testing it out. As I heard myself apologizing to them despite their rejecting glares, I also heard my inner voice reassuring me that looking at these individuals through the sights of my rifle was exactly what I needed to be doing.

As the day moved slowly ahead and the polarization had put some significant physical distance between the two sides, we began to quietly taunt one another. Though I was probably among the first to begin the practice of using my weapon to perform mock targeting of our brothers and sisters across the way, the practice emerged spontaneously on its own soon after. Everyone on both sides was engaged in it, and at one point I and an opponent one hundred yards away had both sighted in one another at the same time. He had a scope while I had iron sights, but I recall at that moment feeling very confident in my abilities and in his supposed lack of skill, resting quite assured that had the moment been not just an exercise, my opponent would be dead.

Confident that my own personal cache was sufficient for the skirmishes to come, I now turned my attention toward the overall organization and plan of our side. I sought out those that I recognized from earlier as having contributed to the logistical planning, and solicited status reports from them. I learned that though overall we felt quite confident in the positions we had taken up, we had very little intel and no organized reconnaissance to know what the other side was up to. It was then that I realized I had watched several from the other side moving far off to my right into an area I was unfamiliar with, and it occurred to me that we could very well be flanked from the outset if we didn’t correct this before the actual fight began. The tensions were very, very high now, and I knew that it would not be long before someone would be unable to take the anticipation any longer and would fire the first shot. We were not prepared, not yet! The only solace was in the fact that we knew the other side was at least as disorganized as we were, and that among their ranks they were greatly lacking in people who had sufficient firearm and military skills. Still, this supposition was not sufficient to completely alleviate my concerns, and served to erode the confidence I had in the belief in the favorable outcome I both preached and clung to myself. I sat down and took a drink from my camel pack, and for a moment realized the absolute absurdity of it all. What had we come to? It had all come down to people who were so entrenched in their beliefs and who had allowed themselves to be divided along every societal line possible that we had concluded it was a better choice to simply kill those who disagreed with us rather than do what was necessary to just work it out. There was no looming evil among the other side; there was no true physical threat from them toward us or our posterity; the source of this entire budding war, the motivation for the call to arms all of us had responded to, was over nothing more or less than rhetoric and ideology. The true enemy, the true source of what had moved the passions within us all against one another, was NOT one another; no, for we had all managed to get along, find common ground, and reach acceptable compromises for a hundred years. We were all beyond the point of no return now, and there would be no standing down. But the true instigator of what was about to take place was the very government we had elected to represent our best interests, which had willfully engaged in the premeditated practice of pitting brother against brother for the past four years. The government had utilized its resources to carve the general populace up into demographic segments and then pit them against one another. It had then flexed its fiscal abilities to create and promote such an atmosphere of destitution, poverty, and dependence as to deflate the morale of the people as a whole and cause the bulk of the masses who were now dependent on government for their sustenance to despise those who remained self-sufficient. Leveraging the media outlets who were loyal to its causes, the government managed to continuously fuel and fan the embers of divisiveness until one day they had simply spontaneously burst into a flame that fueled itself. The government we trusted, run by corrupt men of power and wealth via the puppet-like proxies they had managed to set up over the decades, turned and fed on us. Not being able to wholly beat us into any kind of submission itself, it followed wisely in the footsteps of one Jack the Giant Slayer, and simply turned us against ourselves. Once we conclude the bloody business of destroying ourselves from within, they will simply descend upon the aftermath and do with us as they will. We are fools.