We live in an age where we no longer share the same reality.
I thought that the war would start sometime after 10 PM on Friday. That would correspond to the 3 PM deadline that President Trump gave the Iranians. But 10 PM came and went. As I lay in bed, I looked at my watch: 2:10 AM, 3:45 AM, and still no horrific screech on the telephone. Then at 8:15 AM, it came. First came the sirens, then came the phone noise—the only time I heard such a thing in the US was from my brother’s phone when the National Weather Service sent out a severe weather alert. We ran to our parking lot/bomb shelter and met many old friends from eight months ago. On Saturday, we made eight trips there. Sunday morning, we made four more dashes from our home. Here is a link to the sound one hears when the sirens go off. If I could bless all Americans, I would bless them that they should never hear an air raid siren in anger. When they go off with all of their might, it is terrifying.
The first sirens/warnings apparently were made to make people aware of the opening of hostilities. It reminded me of the B-17 pilots who told their gunners to “clear their throats” and shoot some machine gun rounds over the Channel before getting to the French coast. All morning, we heard planes; it must have been an amazing armada. Israel sent 200 planes for the initial attack, and that does not take into account the hundreds of attacks by American planes. We saw what appeared to be an AWACS doing circles overhead after the first alert, and on Sunday we saw aerial refueling in action. Later, we heard sonic booms, and the only plane that makes those without afterburners is the F-22, 12 copies of which are stationed in Israel.
The Iranians have decided that they will shoot at everybody, and to date, they have destroyed buildings in Bahrain, Jordan, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia. The 200 missiles fired on Israel caused one fatality, two dozen injuries, and some damage. The problem for the Iranians is that they believe their own media: they claimed to have destroyed six percent of Israeli buildings during the Twelve-Day War. Maybe 0.06 percent, if even that high. The Iranians have attacked hotels and have threatened to destroy Dubai’s Burj Khalifa—after having blown up the Dubai international airport. The Iranians have dropped their mask and are attacking any and all, without any effort to focus on US assets or American bases. They are showing their true colors, and they are ugly.
Tucker Carlson declared the attack “absolutely disgusting and evil”, though Donald Trump’s eight-minute statement to the American people (seen by 85 million people last time I checked) was historically correct and factually accurate. A week before, Carlson once again attacked Israel and claimed that the Jewish state thrilled in the murder of children in the pager operation. The reality is that 3,500 terrorists were wounded, a few dozen killed, and apparently two children died as well. Few secret operations in the history of warfare have been so accurate, effective, and devastating. Israel chose the amount of explosives to cause injuries, to cause a huge burden on Hezbollah for the long-term care of their terrorist fighters. A burial is a one-off; paying the family of a guy severely wounded by an exploding pager can continue for decades.
When I saw Tucker’s rant, I realized something disturbing. If we went back 50 years, both Democrats and Republicans could agree on what poverty was. Whether it was in Appalachia or Watts, they recognized it; the only question was how to deal with it. Government handouts? Required work for help? The situation we have today is far more troubling: we no longer live in the same reality. Israel takes pride in the disabling of thousands of potentially murderous terrorists through a very clever program based on Hassan Nasrallah’s request that his men leave cellphones and go back to pagers. Tucker Carlson sees the same operation and looks at two children killed in the presence of those terrorists. Recently, Kurt Schlichter wrote on these pages about Bruce Springsteen and U2 putting out songs about recent events in Minnesota. I had not known about this development. In college, I forced my roommates to hear Springsteen nonstop as I saw two of his concerts in Chicago. During my doctoral work, I did not do a wind trainer workout without U2 providing background music. Their new songs tell us a great deal about what is wrong in America.
The events in Minneapolis are fairly well-described and there are videos to support the actual sequence of events. Two people engaged ICE officers, one apparently trying to run one over and the other fighting with them while having a gun. For Springsteen and Bono, the US should, for some reason, be open to anyone from the Third World. There is no legal basis for such an opinion, but such is their distorted view of “America the way we used to know it”. In such a case, the ICE officers would be like the SS, enforcing illegal orders of the reigning government. For Normal Americans®, the laws are quite clear that one may not enter the US without proper documentation and approval. Those being arrested and deported by ICE, independent of how long they have lived illegally in the US or how wonderful they are, need to go. Their presence comes at the expense of real US citizens, in the areas of work, housing, and government services. We see illegal immigrants who have violated the law and, as such, the actions of ICE and other officers are kosher and necessary. Bruce and Bono, behind their big fences and with security appropriate for a prime minister, think that illegal aliens are okay and that the Trump administration is acting as fascists.
And this divergence of realities is true for almost any subject of the day. Those like Carlson who fought tooth and nail against an attack on Iran don’t see the Islamic regime as a threat because, at this exact moment in time, they don’t have a nuclear weapon or a missile powerful enough to send it to New York. Donald Trump and his supporters realize that “Death to America” started in 1979 and is meant to say that when the time and circumstances allow, then they will realize this threat. In the decades since the revolution, thousands of Americans have been killed and wounded by Iran and its proxies. The president noted major attacks like the barracks bombing in Lebanon. Iran’s now decapitated leadership was evil and looked forward to the day when it could destroy Israel and the United States. That’s what the normal people understand; Carlson and those like him, claiming that the US is making a war because Bibi Netanyahu demanded one, close their eyes to the future and say, “Hey, they can’t destroy the US today. Who needs to attack them?”
Not having a shared reality means that we cannot come to an agreement on anything. It also means that we need to keep the Democrats and their friends on the lunatic right away from the levers of power. They claimed that ice at the poles would disappear, as would the polar bears. They said that coastlines would go underwater. None of it was true, but other than a few converts, they still hold to their nutty ideas that are completely detached from the reality that you and I have to live in. I hate the warning sound my phone makes; I know that it is telling me that a better day may be in the offing. I like that reality.