The Liberty Lamp: Libertarian News & Editorials

My next article will focus on the disturbing and rediculous blather that recently came out of torturemeister, or rather Attorney General Alberto Gonzales's mouth about the USAPATRIOT Act, and why Congress should be stupid enough to renew its provisions at the end of 2005.

For right now, though, let me just provide you with a little schematic of sorts about what happens when a nation "temporarily" gives up one or another of its freedoms in order to "protect the rest", as some stupid and/or corrupt members of our national leadership would like you to:

1. First, and foremost, never in history have such rights revocations been "temporary". Only when a government is destroyed or drastically reformed have such freedoms been rerecognized. Take the NAZIs and the Bolsheviks of the 20th century. Both regimes promised their people oh so piously that everything will be restored to normal "sometime", usually in the long and distant future. If you already haven't realized it yet, "sometime" really means "never, as long as we have anything to do with it".

2. With this in mind, visualize your sacred rights as a solid and ephemiral rock, upon which your free society is based upon. Each time even one fundamental right is chipped away, the foundation becomes smaller, weaker, and more unstable. As with real rocks, the Rock of Rights cannot be put back together. The one and ONLY way to restore it is to break it down into dust, taking down the society it once supported as well. The only way to remake and give a new birth to our sacred Rock is to reforge its susbstances in the intense heat and pressure of (probably military) conflict.

If you stop to think about the situation for a minute, you'll soon see that this outcome is nothing if not inevitable. Think back to the French Revolution. To the Mexican Wars of Independence. Even to the American Revolution, which fuelled the creation of our free and independent Republic in the first place. As surely as there has NEVER been a successful peasant uprising, so to is the inescapability of the fact that an oppressed and disgruntled broad middle class will eventually rise up and vanquish its tyrannical masters. Through blood and tears, if necessary.

Surely, no one reading this article wants that kind of world to become a reality, especially here in America. I, for one, know that I don't! But let us not forget the lesson of our Ancestors, both Native American and European. At some time, a threshold will be reached, and a breaking-point will doubtlessly be discovered. Regardless of odds, what side do you wish to be on? The road is long and hard, and many more peaceful avenues of change can be explored and taken up, but at what point must our legal swords of penmanship be exchanged for the corporal lancets of another force?

~The Phoenix.