Individuals or groups sometimes do things we didn’t expect.
By Michael Kapic, September 11, 2018
[Editor: the following essay was originally written during the Obama Administration by an anonymous airline Captain. He told the second half of the story as it pertained to the then current events. That part has been modified and updated by adapting it to include today’s broader issues and adding a solution. The story still speaks to the same truths on this 17th anniversary of 9/11.]
LOCKED OUT OF THE COCKPIT
By a former Navy fighter pilot and a retired United Airline Captain.
We are all flying on the Germanwings plane, with a twisted pilot at the controls. Will we just wait, and assume the “Crash Position”?
The ‘real’ pilot was locked out of the cockpit.
That set of circumstances was finally revealed after the full horror of the crash of Germanwings flight 9525. It had been on its way from Barcelona, Spain to Dusseldorf, Germany on February 22, 2016. Co-pilot Andreas Lubitz waited for the pilot to leave the cockpit, then locked the door to prevent his re-entry. Then Lubitz, for reasons unknown and perhaps unknowable, deliberately steered the jet into a harrowing 8-minute plunge ending in an explosive 434 mph impact with a rocky mountainside. 150 men, women and children met an immediate, unthinkably violent death.
Lubitz, in his single-minded madness, couldn’t be stopped because anyone who could have changed the jet’s disastrous course was locked out.
It’s hard to imagine the growing feelings of fear and helplessness that the passengers felt as the unforgiving landscape rushed up to meet them. Or as the statuesque twin towers rushed toward the passengers on flights 11 and 175 on September 11, 2001. Or the Pennsylvania ground rising to meet flight 93. Or the parking lot below flight 77 in front of the Pentagon as it blurred passed, a quick glance up to reveal the coming building…
Hard … but not impossible.
Let’s switch gears for a moment and, metaphorically, consider that America is in a similar situation.
And we know it because we can feel it happening. The vitriol and divisive nature of the Establishment in DC, supported by a partisan media, has helped raise politics to a fever pitch.
The roller-coaster has ascended the top and started its steep and speedy fall. We feel the descent in the pits of our stomachs.
As in the passenger’s final seconds, we hear the shake and rattle of structures stressed beyond their limits. We don’t know where we’re going anymore but we do know it isn’t good. And above all, we feel helpless because our government, the swamp, the media, academia, elite politicians and special interests have locked us out of the cabin.
Since the beginning of the 20th century, American citizens have been slowly but progressively locked out of control of their government; told that we should just vote the right people in and we’ll be saved from progressive policies that are turning us away from our founders’ values. We’ve tried voting and it hasn’t worked. Corruption, dysfunction and debt continue. Our speed to certain doom is increasing and the mountain is looming in the narrowing distance. Will we end up like ancient Greece or Rome?
We did attempt to vote in the right people to Congress repeatedly, Congress after Congress (we got the filibuster and increasing debt). And every one of the presidents we selected helped lock the cabin doors tighter (we got unconstitutional growth of new alphabet agencies that promised to solve our problems but have made America worse off). We looked out the window and noticed the Supreme Court making decisions as if the Constitution were a ‘living’ document to be interpreted under changing mores (the welfare and commerce clauses were taken apart and given new meaning). But the very structural integrity is creaking and vibrating as our speed increases, our nose pointed down.
Our once trusted three branches have united into a massive Establishment structure that seems to serve themselves well as it expands and wavers out of control counting on us to bail them out and forgive their mistakes.
We’ve watched our K-12, college, and university industries decline. The industry has become havens for special treatment of speech, or counterproductive affirmative actions at the expense of education.
We’re watching our healthcare quality decline with cost increasing as more third-parties intrude between our doctors and ourselves.
We’re watching as non-Americans creep into our country and begin demanding services as rights and the governments giving it to them. Or allowing criminals (illegals) sanctuary from law enforcement at an increasing risk to our own citizens.
We’re watching non-Americans, the deceased, and felons, voting while American citizens ballots are destroyed or ignored.
We’re watching minorities struggle against governments in large cities who continue to throttle their opportunity or their pursuit of happiness.
We’re watching religious freedoms eroding as new classes of people are carved out of the population with the goal of developing more classes and specialty voters.
We’re watching corporate cronyism accelerate and profit as the government subsidizes winners and decides the losers. American entrepreneurs with innovative new ideas are threatened. Contrary to history, a large percent of corporate media and journalism has supported fraudulent government behavior.
Objects are speeding past us while the Constitution’s Article I is being abused by Congress’ punting of their law writing responsibility to unelected bureaucrats in the Article II branch, passing laws that the citizens do not want.
We watch through the haze as Article II is abused through executive orders or commands to the alphabet agencies to ignore certain laws they don’t like (immigration has completely broken down and crime is increasing; the out of control deep state/swamp threatens the America justice system). The machine is shaking violently as the yelling increases and the last seconds are growing near.
All eyes are on the blur out the windows as evidence of Article III’s abuse by the Supreme Court becomes clear. The Court has misinterpreted the Founders words and have found irrelevant meanings in their simple language (fining a farmer for consuming his own wheat, legitimizing segregation, finding words to give cover to moms killing their children. They unconstitutionally ‘legislate’ from the bench). The screaming has reached a crescendo. We’re in the final seconds.
As our hurtling object approaches an immovable object, the moment of truth, the final moment before collapse, is upon the passengers and/or its citizens. In either case their fate is in God’s hands.
Was Germanwings’ Andreas Lubitz depressed, insane, or abysmally evil when he decided to lock that cockpit door and listen to no voices other than those in his head? Did he somehow believe himself to be doing the right thing?
The voice recordings from the doomed aircraft reveal that as the jet began its rapid descent, the passengers were quiet. There was probably some nervous laughter, confusion, a bit of comforting chatter with seatmates, followed by a brief period in which anxiety had not yet metastasized into terror.
It was only near the end of the 8-minute plunge that everyone finally understood what was really happening. Only near the end when they began to scream.
Like those passengers, a growing number of Americans feel a helpless dread as they come to the inescapable conclusion that our nation’s decline is an act of choice rather than of chance. The choice of a culture in DC who are in full control of our slow, multi-decade plunge.
Lubitz was a nutcase.
But now we are on a ‘plane’ piloted by a narcissistic megalomaniac Establishment who have locked everyone out of the cockpit.
But wait!
As a citizen of the United Sates on a similar voyage, there is an escape hatch or ‘break in case of fire’ safety release, and a way out of America’s conundrum. And its much-used history goes back three centuries.
It can be found in the second clause of Article V of the US Constitution. (Some assembly required)
God Bless the all the victims of terrorists and of broken government policies.
God Bless the Founders for providing America with the Constitution and Article V.