There is something deeply strange about living a normal life when the world around you feels anything but normal.

I wake up. I go to work. I pay the bills. I pick my kids up from school. I mow my grass. I coach baseball.

I stand on a ballfield watching the boys on my ballteam play a game they love. I see parents cheering. But for a couple of hours a few days a week, life feels almost exactly the way it’s supposed to.

But then I get in my truck and see the price of gas. Today it is 4.19$ a gallon where I live.

I go to the grocery store and the amount of money that used to fill a cart barely fills a basket. How are people surviving? Tough choices are having to be made.

Then I get home and do my best to avoid the news. War. Corruption. Scandals. Debt. Inflation. Our government is more interested in protecting itself than serving the people they are supposed to represent.

But somehow the next morning, I get up and do it all over again.

I can’t quite explain it.

How do you reconcile the two realities?

How do I stand on a ballfield a few days a week knowing that our country is finished and collapsing and everything feels increasingly unstable?

People don’t want to talk about the evil we are faced with.

Maybe that’s what makes all this feel so surreal.

We are living ordinary lives inside an extraordinary period of History.

But what is even more strange is how quickly we have adapted to it.

Things that would have seemed outrageous years ago are now just background noise. Government scandals come and go. Promises are broken. Our money disappears into thin air. People are caught lying, cheating, stealing, and breaking the law and there are no consequences.

We get angry for a few days.

Then something else happens.

Then we move on.

There’s an unsettling numbness to it.

I don’t think people don’t care. I think many people care deeply. But they’re exhausted and feel minuscule.

We are too busy working. We are too busy raising children. We are too busy trying to make our mortgage payment. We are trying to keep food on the table. We are trying to put gas in our vehicles. We are trying to provide a good life for our children.

We don’t have the luxury of spending time being outraged at all the injustices we are a witness to on a daily basis.

Maybe it’s not Apathy.

Maybe it’s Survival.

But we should never become accustomed to things that should never feel normal.

There should be a point where we collectively say, “Enough!”

I don’t write much anymore and I apologize for that. I thought we would all stand together long ago and sadly we still aren’t any closer to standing up and fighting back against this evil we are faced with.

It’s frustrating.

People are so accustomed to the corruption now that we have stopped expecting better.

We have stopped caring.

We have stopped believing we can do something about it.

While the world is chaotic and evil surrounds us. I still have to raise my children.  I still have to show up.

But we need not be numb to the evil that has taken over this world.

As bad as we think it is, to most people it isn’t bad at all.

What I’m getting at is, there is no voting our way out of this mess gentlemen. They are not going to give up their power and acknowledge our votes. Evil doesn’t care. The last few decades should have proven that to you. These times are no different than any other times in history in at least one respect, history will be largely written by the winners. How do you want your descendants to remember you? Make your choices now and be prepared to do your utmost to make history what you would like it to be.

A final question that we also need to answer is, are you willing to defy the system and if so, are you willing to do so up to and including giving your own life?

Wes