Time and hurry. We can hope, but hope is not a plan, and it is certainly not the way to bet.

Something was telling him that he had very little time left. It was a mental itch that came, perhaps, with a nearly imperceptible change in the weather, a slight edge to the chill of the predawn. A sense of foreboding, perhaps, or was it a sense of excitement? A different rhythm in his heart. Whatever it was he sensed it. And he trusted it. . . something in the landscape seemed to speak to him, and today it said: hurry. -- Apacheria, a novel of alternate history, by Jake Page.

"This is the Site of LaGrange College. Chartered in 1830 by Act of the Legislature of Alabama. An Insitution of High Order for Men Attended Chiefly by Students From the Southern States. The College was Burned April 28, 1863 By Federal Cavalry Commanded by Colonel Florence M. Cornyn Under General Granville Dodge."

Yesterday I visited an old friend now confined to a hospital bed in Corinth, Mississippi. John Russell, as many of you know, is a veteran of the United States Army, a true American patriot, an accomplished teacher of various martial arts and maker of what are known by the untutored masses (which includes myself) as samurai swords. John is a brilliant man, a real renaissance kind of guy, a man who could use language as deftly as a katana to fillet an opponent before he even understood he'd been defeated. Yet now, as a result of a pair of severe strokes, his hands which crafted such works of martial beauty no longer fully respond to his will and, worse, his wit -- every bit as present now as when I first met this impressive man in a GP large tent in Texas in 1995 -- is trapped, unable to be expressed by dysphasia. Bob Wright, perhaps John's best friend, had been searching for him for weeks. We knew that something must have happened, but John's two sisters, his only remaining family, are (it is a matter of official record) both substance abusers and each accuse the other (or so I was told by a nurse) of being lying manipulators. As it happens, they are likely both right. In any case, although they knew of John's plight and that Bob was looking for him, it took a call to a county sheriff to tell us where John was. Once I found out that he was in Corinth, I immediately told Rosey that we had a road trip scheduled for Saturday.

Prior to yesterday then, John had little reason to doubt that he had been abandoned by his friends. By one of those odd coincidences that God sometimes presents, while I was there another of John's friends, a former martial arts student, also dropped by, having had to similarly track him down. John's beaming smiles that marked his reaction to two old friends showing up almost simultaneously gladdened our hearts. His case is by no means hopeless, and please keep John in your prayers as he goes through a difficult rehab process.

But even though John could not speak, it was evident that he wanted to know what was happening in the wider world, so I gave him a briefing of the situation as I understood it. There are, I told him, three battlefields where our increasingly sharp cold war with the regime can flash hot at any moment, places where we are entering the end game of where politics still matter just prior to someone getting shot because of official miscalculation.

"Hope is doing what has to be done because it is the right thing to do." -- Apacheria, p. 41.

I told John that the border crisis -- as important as it was to the regime's continuing crisis of legitimacy and despite the wall-to-wall coverage on the cable channels -- was a secondary, or even tertiary, threat. If we are to back down the domestic enemies of the Republic without immediate violence, we needed to achieve success on three battlefields: Colorado, Nevada and Connecticut.

Colorado, I told John, was the easiest fight to win. If the gun rights movement (in the largest sense) can keep the issue of Hickenlooper's folly in front of the voters in November, they will send him and his party on their way. The firearms liberty issue obviously still cut across party lines in Colorado as evidenced by the results of the recalls. A comprehensive defeat in CO to the efforts of Bloomberg and Co. would roll back the threat and reinforce in the bones of the elites of both political parties that the issue is poisonous to their appetites.

The second battlefield, I told John, was Nevada. Harry Reid has promised us that the Bundy standoff "isn't over." I explained the problems inherent with the Bundy embrace of the sociopath Ryan Payne and that defense of the Bundys would have to proceed from other approaches and different directions. The point, as I laid these out, was to give Harry Reid and his gambling titan masters something else to worry about besides the Bundys. As I explained some of the details he began to smile, big time.

The third, most critical, battlefield however, was Connecticut. Here -- although Malloy and his Commissar Lawlor are presently whispering to the state police that they want no incidents before the election -- our best information is that after his re-election, Malloy intends to begin enforcing the law in a big way. This is made more certain by the fact that the corrupt GOP can't get its act together. It will be, I predicted, reelection in November; raids by December; state police overwhelmed like Custer at Little Big Horn mere days after they declare this war on their own people; federal intervention immediately afterward, with universal civil war subsequent to that.

The only possibility to defer that, a slim possibility at that, is to convince CT voters that a vote for Malloy is a vote to kill their firearm-owning neighbors or put them in camps. I then told John some of what I had in mind to get this point across. He frowned, tried to speak, and failed, although I strained to understand. In the end, I told him to get better, as tough as that would be, for we needed every hand, every voice, in what was coming and that included his.

On the way home, I drove through countryside that had seen much devastation in the civil war of 1861-1865, places that I knew well from my travels across it years before, doing research on cavalry campaigns, Alabama unionists and United States Colored Troops. The road signs -- Corinth, Iuka, Florence, Tuscumbia, LaGrange, Town Creek -- were all markers along the path of the "Destroying Angels" of Colonel Florence Cornyn's cavalry brigade. I hadn't been this way in over a decade, and the examples of one civil war brought home to me the foreboding, the certainty almost, of another. We are nearly out of time. We must hurry to prevent what can be prevented, or failing that, to save what can be saved. We can hope, but hope is not a plan, and it is certainly not the way to bet.