I just had what I believe to be a decent, if not good, idea. Instead of propelling our country ever more briskly toward sameness, uniformity and an ever-more-powerful centralized government let's try an experiment where citizens have protected rights that are unassailable and inalienable. It seems there was such an experiment somewhere in history but the time has come to give it another shot. Our country has strayed many miles from its home and we are experiencing separation anxiety from our freedoms. Our pursuit of happiness has but a few, ever-decreasing options and within the next 30 years I would say that the path to "happiness" will be as narrowly defined as the term "happiness" itself. Fascism is the theme I see in our future and it causes me great distress. Additionally, it is being perpetrated by people who think they are measurably more compassionate than anyone else and by people who, if you ask them, believe that people are inherently good. If people are inherently good, why do they need so much intervention and oversight from a demonstrably evil, power-hungry government? If the love of money is the root of all evil then the government should be the most carefully watched suspect. Instead we hand over more and more power every day and it is used to co-opt more and more of our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor. I leave you with a quote from Alexis de Tocqueville, who, in the early to mid 1800's had identified a possible pothole in our form of government called a soft tyranny. He described it this way, "It covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered but softened, bent and guided. Men are seldom forced by it to act but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy but it prevents existence, it does not tyrannize but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes and stupefies a people until every nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd".(and the people said, "Bah,bah, baaahhh.)
