“How,” I ask, “do Americans not see what is happening to our country?”

“Why,” I wonder, “don’t Americans do something about the loss — the literal loss — of the United States of America?”

“What,” I question, “could possibly get so many to go along with a bloodless coup of the strongest nation in the world?”

After this last weekend, I believe I’ve found at least part of the answer.

Before we go on, I want to show you an experiment that I think will demonstrate the point. This will be somewhat difficult, since I can’t physically be in front of you; I have to give you some instructions and suggest that you try to perform it before you read the rest of the article. If you don’t, you’ll already know what to expect and the experiment, for you, will fail. (However, you could try the experiment on others and see what happens. This will hopefully help you see the point.)

So here’s the first set of instructions: When you click on the link in the next sentence, you should get a video (it is 7 megabytes so it will take a few minutes to download; it’s worth it). Run the video and count the number of times the players with white shirts pass the basketball to one another, then after the video return here and click the link in the next paragraph to see what to do next. But don’t close the window with the video. You’ll need it one more time. (If you close it, there will be another link in the second set of instructions to get to it, but you’ll have the several-minute wait to download it again.)

I’ve set up two separate links so those who want to get the full appreciation of the experiment can read the article in stages, following the instructions at the first step before moving to the second step. For those who want to perform the entire experiment, click this link for instructions on what to do next.

For those who don’t want to do the experiment, click this link to read the rest of the article.

After that, you can close all the extra windows. Depending on how you read the article, you may have one for this article, one for the video, one for the second set of instructions and one for the last part of the article open if you’ve done everything I suggested to follow the entire experiment.