Imagine

In song, John Lennon imagined a world without belligerence ... without war. Yet, his tragic reward was the very violence he decried. It’s as though he wished the wind to stop blowing ... the lightning to only strike up ... the lion to lie down with the lamb. A nice thought ... but only a thought ... not reality.

The human animal is a carnivore ... thus a killer. It’s a very short step from killing for food ... to killing for pleasure ... to killing for power. We deny all this by believing we’re civilized ... but this is only a patina ... killing has been forever an integral part of living and thus the taking of life is in our DNA ... inescapably.

And yet, men, and now women, have forever matched off to war knowing that they may not come back. Remarkable ... and deserving of somber remembrance.

Please, kind reader, join me in doing this on this Memorial Day.

Imagine

John Lennon wrote a hymn to a perfect world where peace prevailed  and there were no borders defining countries ... see: Imagine lyrics. Clearly, Lennon's vision of utopia must have had some influence on world politics in the years that followed ... particularly in the European Union.

Fast forward some fifty years to the presidential election of 2016 and let's do some more imagining. Can we picture what our country would be like if Hillary Rodham Clinton had been elected? Who would likely be the primary players in her administration? Ben Rhodes? Susan Rice? Jonathan Gruber? James Comey? Sidney Blumenthal? John Brennan? John Kerry? Donna Brazile? John Podesta? James Clapper, Cheryl Mills? Maybe even Bill Clinton himself?

Imagine what the Supreme Court would look like? The FBI? The Department of Justice? The IRS? The EPA? The State Department? The Defense Department? Our representative to the UN? The regulation environment? Even the Clinton Foundation and all its tentacles might still exist ... as might the ISIS caliphate?

We would still be bending over for the environmentalists in the Paris Accord ... or maybe going even further. There would be no tax cuts or a rollback of the Obamacare individual mandate. We would still be in the TPP (no matter what Hillary said during her campaign). We would be even further along toward true open borders and unlimited immigration from third world countries. Jerusalem would not be recognized as the capital of Israel. Economic growth would still be anemic along with the stock market.

There would have been no exposure of all the (illegal?) Democrat shenanigans that took place during the presidential campaign. We would likely have a Democrat Senate and maybe even the House. North Korea and China would still have us kowtowed. Companies would not be bringing their factories back onshore. And many more positive developments would not have occurred.

We would be living in even more of a dystopia than Barack Obama saddled us with. Maybe Ted Nugent should pen a new version of "Imagine?"

Imagine ...

... if Russia or China or Iran or whoever managed with whatever means to shut down the Internet for some period of time. The world has become so dependent on this technology that I believe such an event would cause societal extremis. Just imagine:

- The millions if not billions of people being deprived of their latest news fix from the many Internet sites that now substitute for newspapers. Then a robbery in Peoria or a flood in Perth would not seem quite so important ...

- Social media no longer giving millennials and the other young "gens" the latest updates of the going-ons in their electronic tribe. Face to face communication might just reappear ...

- Tweeters and other instant-message purveyors not being able to comment in real-time to the latest political and social outrages. Politics would then become less strident ...

- Bloggers and other opinion writers being constrained to the lethal gauntlet of trying to get their letters to the editor published in their dying local newspaper ...

- The lack of a e-mail capability making snail-mail letters and FAXes the fallback methods of text communications. Postal carrier mail delivery loads would therefore skyrocket ...

- Television news and opinion programming being deprived of the wellspring of news items from around the world ... instead, being forced to report only about local fires, weddings and traffic accidents ...

- Terrorists and [blank] Lives Matter protesters not being able to coordinate the logistics of their sit-ins or suicide bombings. Wouldn't that be a shame? ...

- Stock market trading being required to go through a telephone call to a broker ... trading volumes would decline dramatically ...

- On-line shopping disappearing ... Amazon, Alibaba, etc. would quickly fold and dying shopping malls would suddenly be reborn. UPS and FedEx package volumes would crater ...

- On-line banking, credit card transactions and money transfers vanishing. Cash would reemerge as the primary unit of commerce ...

But now thinking about it, I'm not entirely sure that the world would be that much worse off ...


Afterward: I forgot ... imagine all the government workers who would be forced to be productive instead of watching porn all day ...