“The scrappy attitude is the winning attitude. You can choose to be scrappy and relentless or you can choose to roll over, make an excuse, and surrender to weakness.”
Gary Ryan

I am as furious as most of you are at the senseless deaths of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, and like most people I am feeling the need for lightening strike justice. I am not known for having a cool head and my knee-jerk reaction is to push back with equal ferocity.

But if we do, then we are walking directly into a well laid trap.

Make no mistake about it, Donald Trump wants a civil war. He wants an excuse to send our own military in to annihilate any and every threat to his regime. He wants any excuse to use lethal force on crowds of protesters. He wants no less than to kill the opposition and he doesn't care how he does it.

As far as I know our physical Constitution still resides protected by specially created glass and argon gas inside the National Archives. I don't think Trump has succeeded in destroying it as he has the East Wing of the White House. It is still the law on which our country was founded, and there are still good people in Washington who are fighting to protect and preserve it.

As hard as it is not to take that irrevocable step, we must not resort to violence (ie using the second amendment to defend the fourth amendment). Instead we must continue to practice our first amendment right to free speech and peaceful assembly. We must fight hard to defeat those in Congress who have betrayed us. Learn and remember their names, and kick their asses out! Then we must, absolutely must, vigorously support those in Congress who are working, legally per constitutional law, to defend our country. I know it sounds implausible at this point but there are still honorable men and women in Washington, and many of them are themselves under direct attack. Yet still they fight for us. Some of us made the mistake of “hiring” the wrong people and now feel powerless to remove them. Especially when they use methods such as gerrymandering to “fix” elections. But we're not powerless. There are more of us than there are of them and maintaining our unity is paramount. We can fight dirty without getting dirty by being smarter than they are.

There may come a time when we no longer have the choice but to take up arms. But only if we find ourselves with our backs to the wall. We are not there yet. There is still hope. We Americans are a scrappy lot. Especially when the fight is righteous.

c. 2026