For several years now, I have read through my Facebook newsfeed to get a feel not for what’s going on in the world, but for how my network feels about it.  I have a fairly diverse number of folks whose stories show up in my feed: Christians and atheists, gays and straights, feminazis and chauvinists, and one guy who is convinced that the oppressive patriarchy is the worst thing on earth because, rape culture.  (I keep him for entertainment.)  It’s always interested me how people view what goes on around them—and it maddens me when they don’t care.  For some time now, the far majority didn’t care a bit.

In the last few months, however, I’ve seen more people posting news links.  More people saying, “Hey, wait a minute.”  More people asking the questions and not liking the answers.  It has gotten more prevalent in recent weeks, until I noticed something distinct last night as I scrolled through reading people’s reactions to the news that the government planned to send riot troops to control them, to force them to accept lawlessness and disease, criminals and violence.  In between the one lady who always rants about corporate greed and the guy who always posts photos of his food, I started realizing that the same statement was showing up in my feed.  Over and over.  The further down I scrolled the more I saw it.  People from all over the nation, of every color, of different religious beliefs or none at all, unrelated people who have never even heard of each other somehow keep posting the same thing:

Enough is enough.

Enough of federal overreach.  Enough of having violent gang members forced upon us, and being told we must support them financially.  Enough with being exposed to diseases not seen here in decades, or ever.  Enough scandals, enough lying, enough dead Americans, enough making America the world’s laughingstock, enough pretending they “had no idea”, enough surveillance and constitutional disregard and land grabbing and ammo hoarding and gun taking and lawbreaking and filling the federal government with radical Islamists and the military with illegals.  Enough of laying America open like a wounded deer in front of a pack of ravenous wolves, other countries who have waited decades for this moment.

There is a low rumble in the air like a faraway summer thunderstorm that you know is coming, you just don’t know when.  It’s like standing in the shallows of the ocean and watching a wave build in the distance.  It looks like just a calm little ripple way out there, but by the time it reaches the shore it has a force you never expected.  That is what it feels like right now, like thousands of people are wiping the sleep from their eyes and looking around to find that, like in Rip Van Winkle, the world is not what it was when they went to sleep.  Is it too late? Perhaps, maybe even probably.  But we have no other choice.  We must wake up.  We must stand up.  We must draw that line in the sand and say no further.  It has already gone so much further than it ever should have.  We must be willing to stop it.  We must be willing to say “over my dead body” and mean it.

There is another phrase I keep seeing over and over in my emails and my social media feeds, and it gives me hope.  It makes me believe that just maybe there is a little time left for this nation we love so dearly.  Time and time again I see these two words, and every time I see them my heart jumps in my chest.

For liberty.

For everything we believe in.  For the ones who died for us.  For the idea that we are free men.  For the barefoot, freezing soldiers on the Delaware and the Marines who died at Belleau Wood.  For the nameless ones at the Tomb of the Unknown, who gave up not only their lives, but their own names.  For the belief that we deserve to be left alone to live in peace.  For the pilots and the paratroopers and the ground-pounders and the tunnel rats.  For the terrified souls who thought that jumping from the World Trade Center was better than burning to death, and the men who to this day are listed as “Missing in Action” in a land we’ve never seen.  For the baby you hold in your arms today, and the child she will hold tomorrow.  We owe so much, and we have so great a responsibility.  We have failed in that responsibility for so long that now we have come to the point Winston Churchill spoke of: It is not enough that you do your best.  Sometimes you must do what is required.

Enough is enough.

You are not alone; others all over the country are standing up.  Be counted.  Do not cower and think that you are the only one.  We need every person we can get, everyone who understands what liberty costs and is willing to pay that price.  We must do what is required, no matter the cost.

For liberty.