Thread by @ThyConsigliori

John Minford, #SunTzu 7: 17 "Be ravaging as a fire; be still as a mountain."

I say again, my I Ching man is Alfred Huang. There is a very specific chapter in the I Ching, 56 out of 64, that today's verse refers to. Huang calls it Traveling. Fire travels up the mountain.

Feel the power of the forces in play. Water travels down the mountain. Fire travels up. If you would evade your attacker, lower your stance, drop your knees, travel down like water. If you would attack rise up, stiffen, thrust forward, upward like fire. Water drops, fire rises.

As Master Sun's work is ancient to us, the I Ching was ancient to him. Fire over mountain, or perhaps, fire on the mountain, was an ancient image going back thousands of years. To travel is a fire burning in the heart of an otherwise settled person. You climb mountains like fire.

An aside. My family's religion prohibited going to movie theaters. My uncle tricked us into going when I was 7 years old, so the first movie in a theater I ever was was The Sound of Music. Can you hear the soaring sounds of the song, Climb Every Mountain?

Master Sun, and even the I Ching, does not seem to discuss how the sound of music rises, not only in its crescendo of louder sounds, but also as it travels upward, the clarion call of a trumpet, a soprano, a powerful orchestra. Yet, just like fire, it too rises up the mountain.

We've discussed Hannibal and his attack on Italy from the Alps, recently. Consider his great elephant driven army climbing up those cold mountains. His will was the fire. The mountains the obstacle. They were, in his case, the path to his doom. Italy was ready on the other side.

Yet the fire of Hannibal's rage has entered the stream of history, and there's no better way to feel it than fire on the mountain, rising. You're not, like me, a Lord of the Rings fan, are you? Smaug, the dragon, and his desolation on the mountain. Fire on the mountain.

What Master Huang tells us, in his commentary on Chapter 56 of the I Ching, is that to travel at all is to have that fire within your own soul that drives you to climb the mountain, like Hannibal or the Von Trapp family, and overcome its obstacle.

Master Sun takes the image further. Be RAVAGING as a fire. Instantly, we revert to General Sherman's March to Atlanta. He burned the South. As a boy growing up in Illinois, a very Northern state, I believed the South needed to be burned, to burn up the evil of slavery.

In adulthood, my faith in our Civil War myths weakened, but the mountain of slavery in American history was likely never going to be traversed without just such a conflagration. If often takes war to travel from one epoch to another.

Part of my libertarian problem with the Civil War was that it enforced the power of the federal center over the dispersed states and put paid to the right of secession. The federal center has grown ever since. Lincoln imposed the first income tax, later struck down by SCOTUS.

Taft, Roosevelt and most of all Woodrow Wilson gave us the new footing in America of progressivism, and the amendments that enshrined centralized federal power over the dispersed states in 1913. A libertarian heart weeps over the year 1913.

But let's let go of history and focus on today's mountain, and today's fire. First, for Master Sun, a still mountain is impossible to defeat. It can allow the fire to rage up its side, no matter. That's how we must be. We have our constitution, and there we stand, still.

For us, the still mountain we must be is 100% centered on the literal language of the constitution as Justice Scalia taught us to be. Oh, fire. Raging in my soul still. No autopsy? I'll say it. Obama had him assassinated. Proof? I have none. Just the raging fire in my soul.

I find I must go personal. Prior to 2016, political activism was on the other side of a mountain range called intelligent business practice, where we don't discuss sex or politics in public. Justice Scalia's unsolved death was one of the elements of fire that got me to travel.

Does political assassination exist in the United States? With all the heartbroken sadness I have, yet the raging fire of justice in my soul, I say it does. A mountain is inertia. A fire burns fuel, rising, and overcomes inertia. Is there a fire in my soul? Surely you know.

This is what the media and the establishment will never understand. @realDonaldTrump has fire in his soul. They do not. They're the low-lying swampy marsh, contented as can be, no need to travel or burn up a mountain pass. The rest of us, Forgotten Americans, we rage.

Ravaging fire that he was, @realDonaldTrump climbed our mountain for us. He burnt through the opposition and won against all odds. Who among us, who dreams of life on the other side of the mountain range, can ever forget the hope and joy we felt?

The mountainous opposition remains. How do we reclaim the House? How do we rewin the education of our children, and reintroduce American principles into their upbringing? How do we protect our freedoms and rebuild our position in the world? These are mountains.

As our leader does, we must be ready to burn hot, to ravage the enemies that stand between us on the path to making America great again. Yet, in our souls, we must be still as the righteous mountain our founders bequeathed to us. Can you be both, the fire and the mountain?

170 verses completed, 252 to go.

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