The procedure of the judgment is described in Matthew 25:31-46, and in the Apocalypse 20:12. Commentators see in those passages allegorical descriptions intended to convey in a vivid manner the fact that in the last judgment the conduct and deserts of each individual will be made plain not only to his own conscience but to the knowledge of the assembled world. It is probable that no words will be spoken in the judgment, but that in one instant, through a Divine illumination, each creature will thoroughly understand his own moral condition and that of every fellow creature (Romans 2:15).

— From New Advent

Four o’clock and all’s well.

Honestly, sometimes I look around and do not recognize my fellow men. I’d like to say it’s just Gibson, and Gibson’s nine parts insane (and one part pig-ignorant), but the thing is, he’s not saying anything I haven’t heard in bars and at barbecues, over coffee and the telephone lines. Just get them. I don’t care which them. Just get them. And once you’ve got them, do what you like, do whatever is necessary for my comfort, for my anger, for my need to be revenged of a wrong not even done to me. Do whatever you think is necessary, what I think having clearly become irrelevant as I’ve apparently ceased thinking at all.

We say to the innocent, this is what you get. For living in a time of heightened awareness to a problem about which we could not have given a tinker’s damn until it came to us and we had no choice but to no longer ignore it. This is what you get, because we’ve just got to shoot somebody, and we’ve judged you, and the facts are irrelevant, and truth is irrelevant, and in fact truth doesn’t even exist anymore, because our paranoia rules the day. We say to the innocent, this is what you get when you step out of line, when you run, when you so much as look like you’ve done something wrong. This is what you get, because we care about appearances of evil now, we judge appearances because we won’t put the time into understanding terror to be anything but.

This is what you get, so that they can feel safe in John Gibson’s house, in Alabama, in Wyoming, in Utah and Idaho and Ohio and Arizona. This is what you get, so that people who would otherwise have to wonder what on earth was going on can be reassured that at the very least we know how to shoot. And if the target of our bullets turns out to be innocent, turns out to have nothing to do with anything, well, all’s well, five in the noggin, and innocence is over, is so five minutes ago, and what’s one life for our comfort? What’s one life for our cheerleaders of war, for those of us who grasp at the bravery and sacrifice of others yet offer nothing of themselves?

They need this, so this is what you get.

A.