I’m curious at what point civility breaks down in a failing state, at what level does his course of action make sense? I like to establish these limits before emotion can cloud judgement. He may be brash but he’s not wrong yet.
That's how we got to 2017 from 1967, after all--one hour after another, without pause, for 50 years. And then one day, you think "WTF just happened? How did everything get so incredibly awesome and yet also completely awful at the same time?"
If you think, "Gee, I should have done Y way back when X happened," then you should probably be doing Y now, even long after X happened.
I think about how it must feel for ordinary people when important history is happening around them, and if they would have even noticed at the time. It probably feels a lot like a fish feels after biting down on the bait. Everything is fine and normal, then boom, something grabbed me and is pulling me and now the water is gone and some blobby hairy thing has its appendages stuck into my gills and I flop and squirm and flop some more and the water is still gone and everything's going dim and my mouth hurts and the blobby thing is cutting my belly open with its shiny claw and now I can't feel my body and a gull just ate my eye and is tugging at my guts and I can't even flop any more. And I... And it was all so fast... I want to go back...
At what point is it acceptable for the fish to start fighting? It has to start while it is still in the water, while it still can fight. But it doesn't yet know that it should. What do you do if the event that makes it perfectly clear that you should have been doing something all along is also the event that makes it impossible for you to do it? What if the event that would have retroactively justified your behavior never happens?