Vengeance Is Thine

I don’t know what it’s like to be picked on for being a conservative.  The sense of being alone or apart can just wear you out.  And when you’re teased or bullied by liberals (which they’re so prone to do), it can seem like somehow you brought it on yourself – for being different,  for not fitting in with everybody else.

Or ... your resentments fester like raw meat in the sun, and you plot revenge, you plan an epic payback, you fantasize retaliation against all your enemies – and they are legion! – the ones laughing at you, belittling your philosophy and trashing your values.

Then one day the gods reward you. They put you – you – in charge, suddenly, and by your own virtue (you reckon). Your anger has become the solid fuel for an historic launch, and you explode across the sky. Your enemies tremble, and all their works, all their public edifices stand exposed to your wrath. You tear them down, everything your persecutors built up. Their weeping only fills you with moral certitude, and you think of new and novel ways to make them suffer. Because you can.

Luckily, your philosophy and your values preach the everlasting punishment of evil. You harden your heart because the gods have put the rod in your hands, and in your hands alone. Fear of evil drives you. You strike behind you as well as ahead, and on all sides. The lamentations of the suffering touch you not.

The landscape you now dominate is rich with targets: the lazy, the lax, the pampered, the pompous, the self-indulgent dependents who slavishly follow the King of your enemies, all treading the primrose path to their own destruction (and your destruction too, if you don’t stop them first, the whores of Babylon).

One small problem: scorched earth beggers the arsonist too. The purely negative curdles all the cream forever. Karma bites back. He who pulls down the temple also dies with the idolaters.

It gets worse.