What Would I Do?

Let's play pretend, for a moment. This is completely hypothetical, so I will ask that the death threats be kept to a minimum. Let's pretend that George W. Bush is all that we fear him to be.

The year is 2008, midway into an election year. The candidates for both parties are strong and voter turnout is expected to set new records. There is an attack on American soil. Perhaps a suitcase nuclear weapon goes off in a crowded stadium. Maybe it's a biological attack on a major city's water supply. No matter how it goes down, the result is the same. Bush declares martial law and locks down our country.

For the majority of us, nothing really changes that much. We go about our daily lives, to work, school, or the shopping mall. We may notice some consumer goods become short in supply. Basic utilities and social services remain largely intact. The military presence is everywhere. National Guard troops, staffed by young men and women who never expected to be called into action against their own countrymen, man every street corner. Bush further dissolves the Congress and sets about dismantling the Bill of Rights.

Flash forward five years. We live in a police state. Democracy is non-existent. A "coalition of the willing" from other nations decide that America needs to be freed. An awesome invasion ensues, unlike anything the world has seen before. American defense forces are driven back and finally defeated. Bush goes into hiding but is soon rounded up by the invading military. His haggard and disheveled picture is displayed prominently on every media outlet we can access.

The coalition decides to stay and help us rebuild. Now, imagine your life. Electricity is gone for most of the day. Social services are gone altogether. Children meet in bombed out schools until even that is not enough and they stop meeting altogether. Our movement is even more limited and there are no groceries to seek out anyway. If you are a young, adult male, such as I, you are viewed with suspicion at any of the foreign military's checkpoints you must pass. Guns are at the ready to shoot you down should you display the slightest inclination to not cooperate.

Your government is gone. Your national identity is gone. Worse still, the occupying power introduces measures in which your own countrymen are tasked with policing your life. Citizen turned against citizen. Our entire way of life is now in the hands of an occupying power with its own ideas of what kind of government we should have.

What would you do?

What would I do?

Is there a resistance? Do we "take arms against a sea of troubles and, by opposing, end them"? Do we water the tree of liberty with the blood of patriots? Do we declare with one voice to either give us liberty or give us death?

We hear of other patriots organizing together. Those of us who never even contemplated being a soldier are now handed a gun and undertake operations to disrupt the foreign occupation of our land. To be sure, George Bush was an ass, but isn't the devil we know to be preferred over the devil we do not? To what end do we strive? Would the America you know simply accept a foreign invasion, even if we are told it is for our own good?

We are the most heavily armed civilian populace on the planet. How much resistance would spring up, almost over night? What line would we not cross to end the occupation? Would we spare those of our number who are seen as collaborators? What price treason, in such a world?

What would you do?

What would I do?