"Don't look down" is the advice always given to the precariously positioned

 A frequent theme of my essays over at Precipice is the ever-shrinking sliver of terrain I inhabit as a post-American trying to maneuver through this world guided by a set of consistent principles. A few examples are here, here and here.

While I still consider myself a conservative, I've developed a keen sense for what I know to stay away from. I've become quite attuned to the odor wafting from opinion sites whose posts bear look-what-that-awful-Left-is-up-to-now themes. Let's name names: Townhall, The Federalist, American Greatness, The American Thinker. 

What the awful Left is up to hasn't been the whole story for some time now. At the risk of sounding snobbish, I'm going to say that it's clear that such sites are targeting their appeal to ordinary, well-meaning citizens with jobs and other life obligations that limit the amount of time they have to avail themselves of perspective and analysis on the events of the day. This is the kind of person who concludes that the binary-choice argument regarding elections is the last word, the kind who, when presented with the powerful testimony coming out of the January 6 hearings, respond with something along the lines of "Well, we sure didn't have gas prices this high when Trump was president."

But there's a swath of the nation's populace beyond the above-described type of citizen that doesn't just support Trump in the hope of more desirable economic circumstances, but that lives in a fever swamp where anything remotely resembling tolerance can't be found.

It's the piece of real estate on which events such as the recent Texas Republican Party convention take place, an event that sees John Cornyn get booed for trying to find some kind of bipartisan crafting of gun legislation that's consistent with the Second Amendment yet moves the needle on the proliferation of spree killings, and Dan Crenshaw and his staff get physically assaulted, the assailants shouting "Eyepatch McCain!" It's the piece of real estate from which emanates a handwritten letter to Adam Kinzinger threatening the life of his wife and five-month-old son.

It's the terrain that spawns the new video from Missouri candidate for Senator Eric Greitens, showing him leading a commando raid and saying that there's no bag limit when hunting RINOS.  That would be the same Eric Greitens who, his former hairstylist alleges, blackmailed her into secrecy about their affair with a photo of her nude, and whose second wife's sworn affidavit says that part of the reason she divorced him was abuse "such as cuffing our then-3-year-old son across the face at the dinner table." And it would be the same Eric Greitens who leads the field among his fellow Republican candidates in the runup to Missouri's August primary.

And on the world stage, calls for Ukraine and the West to accept compromise regarding the Russian invasion, from voices up to and including the dean of the "realist" foreign-policy school, Henry Kissinger, increase, even as Putin says a new world order of Russia's building is supplanting Western primacy, and Russia threatens Poland with a nuclear strike. 

But the point that the Left continues to become more monstrous is absolutely valid, the disgusting nature of those most vocal in making it notwithstanding. 

LITD readers are surely familiar with my position on abortion. For those who may be new here, I wrote, in a post about the subject the other day that

You can choose to call a zygote, embryo or fetus a clump of cells, or an unviable tissue mass. Hell, you can call it a 3/16-inch Allen wrench. (There's probably a grown adult out there somewhere identifying as such.) But the fact is, that what ever you call it (actually, him or her), you were one once.

In that post, I include this link to a rundown of recent attacks on, and threats against, Catholic pregnancy care centers. And let us not forget the recent arrest of the man who'd traveled across the country and got arrested outside Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh's home, carting on his person

. . .  a firearm, magazines loaded with 10 rounds of ammunition, 17 rounds of ammunition in a plastic bag, and other items authorities believe he intended to use to assassinate the justice. 

Or the more recent demonstration outside SCOTUS Justice Amy Coney Barrett's home by pro-abortion activists who had blood-covered baby dolls taped to their crotches. 

And while I mentioned high gas prices above in the context of their being employed as a distraction from the January 6 hearings, inflation is a very real crisis. Americans' increasing reluctance to go anywhere by motor vehicle that they don't have to is having and will have even more broad economic ramifications. 

He continues to try to deflect from the real causes with hackneyed leftist phrases such as "corporate greed" and "price gouging," but he's also floating concrete steps that would not only be ineffective but destructive of the free market such as invoking "emergency powers" or issuing some kind of "gas cards."

The idea of the federal government taking over the refining industry is being discussed by some who share the president's hatred of dense, reliable and readily available energy forms. 

My overall point is that I increasingly have no use for anyone whose main interest is in going after some kind of other side. This is not a call for kumbaya. I understand that our national polarization is extreme, and perhaps even intractable. But we get nowhere in acting on the hope that it isn't if we ignore half or more of the problem.