Fire investigators have a name for the way people die in house fires. They call it normalcy bias, and it is not what you think. It is not panic. Panic makes you run. Normalcy bias sedates you.
Victims are found with their shoes in their hands. They were leaving. But they stopped to finish some small task. People have died gathering photographs. The smoke was in the room, and they were still tidying up.
The same pattern shows up everywhere the unthinkable happens. The 9/11 Commission's report documents office workers in the towers who lingered after the first plane hit, making phone calls, collecting belongings, waiting for someone in authority to say the word "evacuate." Some of them were on floors that could have evacuated.
They were not stupid. They were stunned. The mind has an assumption that things will continue as they have been (normalcy bias). When reality violates the assumption, the mind does not update. It waits. It waits for the fire to be confirmed by someone else. It waits for the alarm to really mean it. It waits for a person in a uniform to say the word.
Here is the tragedy of the present moment. The fire is real. And we are in it.
They Should Have Run For It - The Berlin Wall
For twelve years the door between east (communist) and west (free) Berlin stood open. Millions saw the communist regime tightening their grip and fled to the free side. The rest told themselves it couldn't last. They thought the communists would relent and things would return to normal.
Then one August morning in 1961, the communist regime built a wall around the people in their grasp. They should have run for it. They discovered that tyranny doesn't announce itself, it builds around you. Whether it builds a wall, a surveillance state, or a two-tiered justice system, the communists are coming for you.
Someone Has To Go First
One of the best-documented dynamics of the Berlin wall was "Success genuinely bred courage."
Conrad Schumann - A guard who vaulted the barbed wire in the first days of the Berlin wall (Aug 1961). Photographs of him were printed around the world. Escape attempts spiked immediately after.
Tunnel 57 - Fifty-seven people escaped through one tunnel in a single night, which was the biggest single escape of the era. Its success directly inspired the next round of tunnel projects.
The 1979 Balloon - Two families (Strelzyk and Wetzel) flew a homemade hot-air balloon over the Wall. It was a tremendous success and was highly publicized. Their ingenuity inspired other balloon attempts.
In the 28 years of the Berlin Wall, roughly 5,000 people escaped successfully. A notable pattern emerged: Escape attempts clustered in waves after each celebrated success. Every escape became proof that it was possible to have a new life.
Walls are going up around us right here, right now, in America: Walls of inflation induced poverty. Walls of a surveillance state. Walls of a two tiered justice system. Walls of unjust and unconstitutional laws. These walls only fall when we refuse to stay under them.
The Debt We All Owe
Some die in the struggle. The living sometimes have to climb over the bodies of the fallen to escape. It is not a photograph and it is not a metaphor about a real battlefield. It is the structure of every liberation in recorded history. Someone pays, and everyone after them walks free. For every successful escape attempt in Berlin, there were an equal or greater number of deaths trying.
Fifty-six men took a chance with their lives and signed the Declaration of Independence. They knew what the signature meant. The document named them traitors to the Crown, and the penalty for treason was death. The last line of the document is a pledge:
"we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor."
Read the order of that sentence. Lives first. Fortunes second. Honor last, because honor is the only thing they could keep if the first two were taken.
Roughly nine of the fifty-six died in the war that followed. Others lost their homes, their farms, their fortunes. John Hart's farm was destroyed and his wife died while he was hiding from the British. Thomas Nelson's estate was ruined financing the army that fought for his signature. The men who signed knew the ledger. They wrote the check anyway.
Why do we honor them? Not because they suffered. Suffering is common. Because the suffering purchased something that was never theirs to keep. An exit, for everyone who came after them.
Soldiers have always understood this better than civilians. The living walk on ground the dead bought. The phrase is old because it is true. Every parade, every folded flag, every Memorial Day is the living acknowledging the transaction: you paid, and I am walking.
The same structure holds for every movement. The first speakers lose first. The whistleblowers. The plaintiffs. The January 6 defendants, like David Moerschel. The ones who stood for something noble and just. Jobs. Names. Freedom. Sometimes their lives.
I can tell you this with certainty:
The nations Founders don't want you to just be grateful. They want you to preserve what they sacrificed and died for!
The First Wave of "Deaths"
The Berlin Wall of the present moment has its own casulaties, and they are not part of the distant past. They are in prison right now or were just released.
Consider one of them, because his numbers are on the public record. A surgical neurophysiologist named David Moerschel attended a rally in Washington on January 6, 2021. He was pushed into the Capitol and left after only 11 minutes. He did no violence or damage. He cooperated with the FBI when they interviewed him. He was charged with seditious conspiracy, a Civil War-era statute written for insurrectionists, and convicted. The government then tried to destroy him: 570 days of pre-trial restrictions, 206 days of house arrest, 288 days in federal prison, 238 days in a halfway house, 437 days on an ankle monitor. His job. His day-trading business. His home, with the eviction notice left on a Sunday. His family was debanked, doxed, and threatened. His children learned to hide when someone knocked on the door.
None of that is said here to pity him. He would not want it, and it would miss the point. He is not a victim. He is the first wave of "deaths" in our national struggle against communism. He tried to preserve the freedoms the Founders gave us. The rest of the country watched the news and went back to work. David didn't go back to work. He was fired. David didn't go home. He went to prison.
Will There Be A Second Wave?
Look at what the machine was actually doing. The goal of the lawfare campaign was never simply to punish the people it caught. It was to make an example. Every ruined name was a message broadcast to everyone watching: this is what happens to people who climb. The goal was to make the first wave look like fools: Reckless and deluded. Then no second wave would ever form. The punishment was the product. The deterrence was the point.
And the country watched, and drew exactly the wrong conclusion. The masses watch the first wave go down and tell themselves: that is the price of involvement. They should never have been there in the first place. The truth is the opposite of that sentence. That is the price of freedom, and it has already been paid once.
So the question sits here, in the middle of the article, where it cannot be avoided. They climbed the proverbial Berlin wall. They took metaphorical bullets. What is your part in the fight for freedom?
The Living Breach
The first wave is not a pile of bodies. It is a line of living men and women that are still fighting.
The martyrs of history are silent. The first wave of American casualties are not. They are still fighting in courtrooms, in appeals, in civil suits against the government that broke them, in their writings, in the witness they bear. David Moerschel tells his fellow defendants:
You're not the sacrifice. You're the example. The proverbial Berlin Wall is already open where you're standing — and you're holding it open with your bare hands so the rest can get through.
Why does this matter for you? Because a pile of bodies asks for mourning. Men and women creating an opening through their sacrifice beckons you to run for it!
The Last Word
The first wave paid dearly. The only question left is whether you climb that metaphorical Berlin Wall, or stay on the side they are sealing.
Forge of Liberty is being built to: Proclaim liberty throughout all the land, unto all the inhabitants thereof. (Leviticus 25:10)