Don’t be corrupt authoritarian jerks.

See you next time on…

I don’t get it. Everyone says they want simple straightforward answers until you give them one. Then they’re all ‘but why’ and ‘we need details’.

Okay, here’s the scoop. The US goes through these periods of self examination. That’s a good thing. The problem starts when we don’t have any goals as a nation or crises to keep us focused. Then we stop self examination and start navel gazing until we get sleepy or find ourselves in the national equivalent of binging on video games. You can see that now in the whole ‘wokeness’ thing – these are people so hungry for significance that they will invent problems to solve.

It’s not like the world doesn’t have plenty of important things to do. It’s not even like the US doesn’t have real problems that need real solutions. It’s that we’re so focused on our belly button that we don’t want to actually work on the hard stuff. It’s always easier to solve make believe problems than real ones.

As always, nation-states can do more than one thing at a time so I’m not saying the US has been totally negligent but we have been so focused on ourselves that we’ve lost track of what we were trying to understand – ourselves. Most Americans have little sense of exactly how powerful and how resilient the US is as a nation. Worse, we’ve been so caught up in self flagellation that we started thinking we’re the source of every problem in the world.

We’re good but we’re not that good. It’s a big world and we’re only one of the flies in its ointment.

The problem with both kinds of misperception of ourselves is that they lead to a kind of paralysis in dealing with ourselves and the rest of the world. Too scared we’ll do something wrong or too scared we’ll end up with all the responsibility both lead to sitting in a corner and doing nothing.

That’s the one thing we don’t get to do. We have way too many responsibilities both to the world and to our fellow countrymen to sit on our backsides.

Then Russia decided to give us a wake up call. Not just us, of course, Europe’s ears are still buzzing.

We got slapped in the face with reality. Not every nation wants rule of law when that means law governs the government. There still are dictators. There are still real authoritarians. There are still nations that aren’t merely grumbling about how American we are but who actually hate us. They hate freedom for everyone. They don’t want the American vision of a peaceful world. They want their own, authoritarian, oppressive systems to govern everyone, not just their own countries.

And the US is the only thing in their way.

They couldn’t have picked a worse time. We were still in the shower and now we’re standing in the front door in a Bugs Bunny bathrobe and a Die Hard shower cap, soaking wet and trying to get our Winnie the Pooh flip flops to stay under us. Doesn’t the planet understand that we need our space?

Welcome to grown up world.

So, what do we need to learn from Russia and China? First off, not to be like them. We’ve been playing with the fire of authoritarianism and censorship. We let a virus and a bunch of alarmists of several different stripes scare us into chipping away at our own freedoms. That has to stop – now.

Want to know the best defense against misinformation? FREEDOM to explore MORE INFORMATION!. Ain’t no perfect experts out there who magically and perfectly know what is and is not good information. Humans are no where near that good. No one person can sort it all out.

But 330 million of us CAN.

This is part of why the public square is so important. It’s why were should NEVER tolerate censorship enforced by any one entity, be it government or corporation. We don’t have to live in a sea of filth and garbage, either. Freedom isn’t licentiousness. Freedom does have boundaries in order to be freedom (see how far the freedom of the open road gets you if you try to drive through a swamp). But we don’t have to give up our freedom in order to keep the public square civil.

Fair rules applied fairly and decided democratically are sufficient. That’s worked for all of human history. It will still work just fine. Messy and fussy, but fine.

Basically, we have got to get our own act together. Time to get dressed, ditch the flip flops and get to work.

Otherwise, we’ll either become like Russia and China, only a much bigger, more powerful and sinister version, or we let them dominate the rest of the world while we debate whether we should even have a Die Hard shower cap.

Russia and China are a very dark mirror. The US can stray down that evil path, IF and only if we let it. What we’re seeing in Russia and China in terms of how they treat their citizens has been mirrored much too much here in the US in recent years. If we don’t want to be a totalitarian dystopia, we have to come back to who we really are and what we really want to be. That’s what Russia and China are inadvertently teaching us.

We should thank them – once we get finished straightening them out.

And yes, we’re keeping the shower cap.