Are you Aragorn?

Bill Whittle is a blogger, essayist, PJ Media’s host of Afterburner and co-host of Trifecta. His new essay “Shards” is posted here (h/t Mr. Instapundit). It’s not only worth the read, it's a shot in the arm, especially if it seems like our uphill battles keep getting steeper. 

Freedom is not the default state of man but rather a force field against tyranny that must be maintained every day through effort and hard work – there’s not one among you that does not look out into the free land that was handed to us by our ancestors with dismay, and the same sense of unfocused dread that a thousand generations felt as the sun dipped ever lower, day by day – because this time, perhaps, it will not climb again. 

The history of mankind has been to rule and to be ruled. For reasons that you and I will never understand, there exists in some people an insatiable desire to tell other people what to do; to bend others to their will. 

. . .  

I don’t know if we can stop the destruction of everything we love in this world. I don’t know that we can destroy this all-seeing eye that seems to watch us all now, day and night, in this once-free land. I don’t know if all of my efforts will amount to anything at all, in the end, and I don’t know if yours will either. 

I only know that every day I will make a decision to do everything I can to make sure my land, my realm, my America does not fall into darkness today.