The World Is Increasingly Unhinged

So much so that this title will be no surprise to anyone. Be a light in the darkness.

Sep 16, 2024

selective focus photography of turned on tubular lamp — Photo by Guilherme Stecanella on Unsplash

The world has become so unhinged already that many people will say the title is kind of obvious. It is. Where I’m coming from is not just that I see it in the news and feel it, myself, but I now constantly hear people around me saying it in daily life.

Yesterday, after the second assassination attempt on President Trump, my neighbor told me, “The world is just going crazy now.” Only a couple of week’s ago, my wife’s son asked her, “When you were young, did you ever think the world would go as crazy as it is right now?” As a younger person he wanted some perspective. Her answer was “Never.” As I wrote about a week ago, I heard another person at a recent family gathering saying it was time to just start shooting people on the Left if they get physically violent and, with notable anger, state, “We need to start packing lumber?” I asked why. “To build the gallows for all the politicians.”

We used to say things like that as joke, but he said it with obvious anger as the next and only solution. Since then, we’ve had another assassination attempt on Donald Trump. I think we all feel it. Some of my readers, no doubt, will side with the family member who told me it was time to start packing lumber and who assured me the Right will win because it has all the guns. I think he forgot about the power of a Molotov cocktail on his house, the kind of weaponry BLM and Antifa prefer that can take out your whole family as easily as a gun, maybe more easily.

The point is that the US is simmering toward insurrections (while those on the Right who actually did such a thing now claim, as the Left always has, theirs was just a peaceful protest). They don’t realize how much they’ve become like Antifa and BLM in moving outside of peaceful protest. When the fighting starts, the other side isn’t going to run away, regardless of which side starts the war. Both sides are ready to rumble if their candidate loses.

We came close to chaos again this weekend

Imagine what would have happened if this second assassination attempt succeeded. We’d be flooded in instant, activated conspiracy theories that are already predictable that would NEVER go away—just as we were with Kennedy, but maybe more so because of the level of hatred now raging throughout the nation. By “activated,” I mean people would act on them, not just rumor them.

The theories are already forming like this: It was the Democratic Party that tried to kill Trump. It was Kamala, controlling all the three-letter agencies to do her opponent in. It was Biden ordering it on her behalf. It was deep-state actors, and Kamala is just their puppet. Maybe, but think that through:

Nothing could be worse for Kamala’s presidency than to win by default via an assassination. Her whole four years would be absolutely overwhelmed with and overshadowed by people saying she’s not their president because they believe she killed the person they were going to vote for, or her apparatchiks or her handlers killed him.

Her government would be seen as the most illegitimate we’ve ever seen throughout her term BECAUSE THE NATION IS READY TO RUMBLE. She’d have to preside over four years of a nation in deep civil unrest, if not all-out civil war. It would be her worst nightmare. If I were Kamala, the assassination of Donald Trump is the last thing I’d want to see, especially when she is running ahead in the polls anyway and gaining ground. Why risk it unless you get in the polls to where it is your only path to victory?

Besides, it makes no sense: Those who are already developing and publishing such conspiracy theories believe the deep state has deep control over the whole country. How can you seriously hold that view and believe, at the same time, the deep state, in power for decades, is so utterly inept it would hire unskilled idiots to do their trickiest job? Idiots who don’t just become fall guys but who blow it! The Mafia could do the job better than these clowns if that is what is happening. Much better.

Would the deep state, really be poking assault rifles through the cyclone fence around a golf course in Pink-Panther style so that the Secret Service can easily find the assassin and try to take him out? Why? It’s cartoonish. If you believe in the deep state, you have to also believe they have considerable control over parts of Secret Service, so why would the agencies they control keep defeating their own plans by taking out their own operatives (albeit letting them come so close to fulfilling their objective that it raises a huge amount of attention to what they are supposedly doing)? It’s as inept as the Keystone Cops.

It’s easy to spin off such theories—so easy that I can imagine what some of them will be while I hammer out this article. By nature of being a conspiracy theory, they never need proof (not ever!)—just grounds for suspicion, of which there are plenty in both of the assassination attempts.

Now I may be all wrong on the conspiracy theories, and I know some will tell me I am, and I wouldn’t be surprised if I was! Maybe the deep state is trying to take Trump out, and maybe Kamala is their boss or their puppet. If they are, they are almost too inept to worry about, but I don't know that it matters for the subject of this article.

Whether what we are seeing is the clumsiest and weakest deep state imaginable that constantly makes its own actors look incredibly stupid and constantly fails at its major objectives, or it is a situation of lone gunmen going insane and crawling in numbers out of the woodwork because times like this inflame their fevered brains, either way—inept conspiracy theories that fail every time or lunatics acting on their own—we still live in a world that is increasingly unhinged; and that’s where I’m really going with this.

The politicians, the deep-state unelected operatives and apparatchiks, and the everyday citizens who are ginned up for a civil war on both sides if theirs doesn’t win, as well as lone-ranger nut jobs, all seem to be at an all-time high in the world today. We live in a world that is now a powder keg.

Global insanity

And it’s not just the United States. Europe is experiencing its own civil turmoil. Without a doubt, a lot of this is due to too many decades of unelected people as well as politicians trying to steer the world into divisive politics and trying to manipulate the world to go places many of us have never wanted to see it go. So, they’ve created huge unrest, whether they are trying to assassinate Trump or not.

Israel’s situation is increasingly becoming more imperiled, not less, and more violent. The latest report is a claim that Russia traded nuclear secrets with Iran, and the only known nuclear secret Iran was lacking at this point was how to build a dependable detonation device for a nuclear weapon. So, if the report is true, Iran now must have all it needs to know to finish building nuclear warheads to deliver to Israel. Of course, they need a way to deliver that warhead that Israel can’t shoot down, whether via very tricky missile technology or smuggling it in. So, it’s still not easy. A single failed attempt that gets discovered guarantees annihilation of Tehran, but it could happen very quickly now.

Israel and the US have both sworn many times they will never let Iran get to that point, so how many days or weeks are we away from all-out war with Iran on a scale capable of shutting down their nuclear operations, which would seem to require regime change in order to seize full control over those operations since bombing reactors is almost as bad of a plan as letting Iran go nuclear? It tends to turn them into nuclear bombs, and the wind can change in a day and carry the disaster anywhere outside of your control or ability to predict.

Israel has also made it clear that all-out war with Lebanon is likely only days or a few weeks away, as it says it has no hope for negotiations and is clearly gearing up for that wider war. It seems highly likely at this point that the conflict in Israel is going to spread and grow more intense, as it already has been doing for months. Israel also threatened a major reprisal against the Houthis this weekend.

Russia continues to threaten to start a nuclear war, not just finish one. It says it will be first to go nuclear if its war with Ukraine goes badly enough. Putin has also decided to add another 150,000 soldiers to his army to bring it up to 1.5-million strong. So, the world is arming up for a major war during a time when we see instability everywhere.

China. Same thing.

There’s nothing new in all of this to anyone reading here, so why am I writing about it? I think partly because I am now hearing so many people on the street say the same thing every week wherever I go. “What’s wrong with the world? It’s gone insane. I never thought I’d see it like this.” It’s way further off its nut in so many ways than it has ever been … at least, in my lifetime.

Of course, this article is particularly fomented by this weekend’s second assassination attempt because it is not just The Donald who again came close to death; it is the entire nation. Deep state or lone actor, a successful assassination would throw this nation into deep turmoil and multiple conspiracies (maybe one of them right?) for decades to come with people ready to act on those beliefs with little or no proof they’re right. It would do nothing to help Kamala if she does win but everything to put her in charge of a completely ungovernable country.

So, without casting further aspersions on anyone’s favorite assassination conspiracy theory (of which several are already taking shape), the bottom line is we’re on a hair trigger for becoming an ungovernable nation. Dem’s and Repub’s alike better both hope that never happens. There may be no recovery from it if it does. And it is realizing how close we came to that all over again that particularly precipitates my writing about it today.

Managing the growing recession will be nothing compared to managing a world of unmanageable chaos. We need some adults in the room who can start tamping down all the incitement, but I don’t see any chance of that happening right now on either side. Not in the leadership, anyway. We especially need less divisive politicians. I don’t doubt there is a deep state that, by manipulating everything, is making the world worse, not better; but stirring up people to hate each other while you claim you’re going to take the deep state out, probably doesn’t make the victory more assured.

I don’t see anyone like that on the leadership horizon. I don’t see anyone who wants to govern toward the center and help the nation heal; so, I don’t have much reason to believe the center will hold. What can we do about it? The only thing I can think of is to not join the darkness, the rage, the violence and add to it.

We are cascading into chaos. The Bible warns that, in the last days, “Because of the increase of wickedness, the love of most will grow cold.” That seems like a summary of these days. Try to keep your love of people in your own community / neighborhood / family alive, hard as it may be, because once we cross that boundary and join the dark forces of violence, the world becomes chaos and darkness to the far horizons as well as deep into ourselves.

You may be the only light in your small part of the present storms, but don’t underestimate the importance of small lights staying lit in dark and stormy times. You may be the only light someone sees to avoid the rocks or find the shore or to know another is out there when help is needed.