Of course, your uncle wasn’t predicting the future. He’s not a prophet. He was just paying attention to the present. It’s why he bought a rifle. He’d be dumb to use it in self-defense, though. That’s against the rules now. But there was a part of your crazy uncle’s mind that believed despotism was really a possibility, not a theoretical one but an actual one, not a delusion of persecution, or something Plato talked about in the Republic, but something deducible from his own life, from what people said and believed and acted upon out in the open.
There may come a time when we will look back at Thanksgiving dinner rants as an unconscious warning, as an early, unheeded expression of something profoundly dangerous. It’s likely we’ll live in a time when Thanksgiving is canceled, after all.
We laughed when we should have listened. Sorry, uncle.
By Matthew Boose • June 26, 2020