day no. 16,256: always resist at the first crime scene

"How we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.” --- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn , The Gulag Archipelago

Always resist at the first crime scene. What comes next, rest assured, will be worse. Whatever they’re willing to do in broad daylight will pale in comparison to what they plan to do to you once they get you behind closed doors.

The second crime scene is always worse than the first.

Predators benefit from our delay. They prey upon our default of thinking that it's too soon to do anything and much to soon to do something drastic. So, tyrants swell where the people are worried about being too soon or too much. The people have a sense of proportion; the predators, however, don't. They bank on your morality making you defenseless against their immorality. Our enemies leverage our sense of proportion against their lack of one. They go too far and expect us to restrain ourselves. They go big and expect us to go home.

It is always easier in retrospect to justify what should have been done, which means it will always be difficult in the moment to justify the intensity of your resistance. 

If you go along to get along, you eventually get to where someone else wants you to be and if you wait too long, you're too far gone to get back.

Beware of the tragic trajectory that accompanies a failure of nerve:

1 - There's nothing to it

2 - There may be something to it someday

3 - There is something to it, but it's too soon to do anything

4 - There was something to it and now it's too late to do anything about it

The Good News is that with God all things are impossible. The trapped are provided a way out and the caught can be released. Our enemies never take God into their accounts and He is always the variable that spoils all of their plans.

Psalm 35:7-9

Since they hid their net for me without cause

and without cause dug a pit for me,

may ruin overtake them by surprise—

may the net they hid entangle them,

may they fall into the pit, to their ruin.

Then my soul will rejoice in the LORD

and delight in his salvation.

The catchers will get caught out.

The trappers will be trapped.

Psalm 141:9–10

Keep me from the snares they have laid for me,

And from the traps of the workers of iniquity.

Let the wicked fall into their own nets,

While I escape safely.

The schemers are going to get gamed.

The plotters are digging their own graves.