A Case for Restoring the Individual.

A little while back I had a conversation with someone on one of the sites that I frequent about freedom and how utility prices have gone up markedly when his country tried to privatize them.

I have made reference to this conversation in a previous blog. And he continued on by saying that anyone who wants to cast out the Government want people to starve and die and not get the care they need. That apparently only the Government can do these things.

Now I disagree with this. I do not automatically assume things of those who want to make the Government Smaller, that they are evil and hate mongers and want to see all people die, heck I do not even do this for everyone who wants big Government.

Some of them have legitimate reasons for having the ideology that they have.

The answer to this quandary is, as I have mentioned in the past, that you cannot be Given Freedom.

No power, force, or man, in the universe can give yourself freedom. Only you can do it.

So the alternative to being just simply being handed freedom by others is to restore the individual.

Restore yourself and your thinking.

You see what people do not seem to realize, I will touch upon this much later, is that people just cannot handle freedom after years of slavery.

People, on the left, point to all the time every time a freedom granting measure fails, whether it is tax cuts or any other freedom granting thing, like getting the Government off your back.

And the prices go up and there is much angst and then people just come out of the wood work and says, ah ha! Freedom has failed. It cannot work let’s go back to the Government.

You see it has struck me as very interesting in what is going on right now, and the main difference between our two movements.

Progressives…well they progress. They grow Government slowly through centuries and decades and convince us that we need to join them in a…Big Government dream.

But it seems to me that far too many people on the Freedom side of the scale just expect everyone to be ‘granted’ freedom and then everything to be hunky dorey.

That it is like some sort of weird Greek myth where Gods can be born out of heads of other Gods fully clothed and in battle armor. It’s like John Adams Comments about George Washington in 1776.

People just expect for Freedom to come out fully formed and for us to go on our merry way.

I am sorry but its a gradual process.

We have to teach ourselves and our society how to be free again.

We have to come into freedom again and take responsibility for ourselves.

Because if we expect to have Freedom for ourselves we have to take the responsibility for ourselves to have it. Because personal Freedom comes hand in hand with personal responsibility. I mean its ironic in some ways and in some cases you get more liberty when the Government has enslaved you then in other ways.

Because you do not have to take responsibility for anything. It’s all the Government.

And once we learn how to restore ourselves, if we learn how to take responsibility for ourselves, if we learn how to help one another out then we can make it. It will be for good.

And once we learn how to be individuals then we can deal with ourselves as individuals. We can learn to think in individual terms.

Not in terms of Government or groups or people.

But individuals, one on one.

Our Character, our beliefs, and our ideologies as individuals.

If we can do that, then we might be able to do anything.

If we can learn to do this, then we can restore our community, our society, our culture, our schools, our Government, our Country, and then our World.

We can do it from the bottom up. Not with anyone giving us freedom, but for us to fix it for ourselves that we will not need anything from anyone.

Well at least no faceless Government, no party, or no agency.

That we can do these things for ourselves and then we can help each other.

They will not have to take responsibility for us. They will not have to take power over us. For we will have our freedoms and our responsibility and our power to strive for a better world.

That we can serve our humanity.

We must restore the individual.

The Essence of Tyranny.

It has come to me while I have been thinking about various blogs that and things that were coming up and I came to the conclusion before I did my next blog I needed to do this one.

I have been pondering about Government, about the role of Government, and what role that they play. But mainly about the disconnect.

There is a big disconnect between Liberals and Conservatives, Socialists and Libertarians, yadda yadda versus oh my gosh.

The disconnect seems to be over precisely what the definition of Tyranny is.

Liberals and Progressives, those more on the left, are of the political opinion that the Government can do things for you. Can be there for you, can provide things for you and stuff and provide you with a living and to be there in case you should fail, or to actually benefit you.

Libertarians generally think that Government cannot do this for you, or at least should not.

It all comes down to a definition of tyranny and just what we think is a big intrusive Government.

Most people think of Tyranny in terms of red hatted, black booted pistol wielding tyrants.

They think of tyranny in terms of people being thrown into gas chambers, held without trial, or have dogs and fire hoses being turned on them. They think of tyranny in mass graves and firing squads directed because you are a political prisoner, or a different religion, sex, creed, or orientation.

But what it comes down to the Libertarian, and many Conservatives is what political philosophers have said from our founders all the way up to the modern-day.

From Ronald Regan:

“When Government Expands, Liberty Contracts.”

“The Nine Most Dangerous words in the English Language are I am from the Government and I am here to help.”

To Thomas Jefferson:

‎”I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them. “

A wise and frugal government, which shall leave men free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned – this is the sum of good government. “

“A government big enough to give you everything you want, is strong enough to take everything you have.”

To Ben Franklin:

“Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

To John Adams:

“A Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty, once lost, is lost forever.”

And I am sure I can find many thousands of others.

That is the essence of tyranny. That is the essence of a radical Government. That is the essence of slavery.

It has occurred to me over and over again something about Government.

Imagine if Jesus, or Gandhi, or Martin Luther King, or God, or John Sheridan ;), was in charge of our Government.

Someone who knows exactly how much everyone needs, that can fairly ‘give’ one persons things to another so it is all fair and balances.

Someone who is Godlike, who is so angelic that they can do anything correctly.

But they are human. They will decay, and in our Government systems force people out eventually.

The quote by Jefferson is the key. The key to all of this.

You see what will happen if someone else gets all that power? A Hitler a Mao or a Stalin? A Government that is big enough to do anything for you, can do anything to you.

I mean the difference is between someone like Jesus, and someone like Hitler. If Jesus did it, it would not be tyranny, Hitler, can use it for any purpose that he wants to put it to.

People see the obvious signs and pictures of Tyranny. The dogs and the gas chambers.

But they do not see the hidden things. The encroachments of our rights on page 432 of a bill. After all we are getting free education! Free health care!

We are being provided for.

In that situation you cannot provide for yourself. You have traded your freedom for your own personal security.

July 4th.

Last year around this time I saw the first clips, on YouTube, of the HBO special John Adams.  One of the clips was of the reading of the Declaration of Independence to a group of people outside a square in Philadelphia.

I teared up.  Sad scene given what is going on.

Fast forward one year and on the Tea Party Patriots Facebook group…must be a Facebook time of the year…going through a faze…I will stop I promise….but on the Tea Party Patriots page the suggestion was made by the admin that maybe we should hold off celebration since our liberty is so under attack.

I responded…well that is stupid.

The Fourth of July is the perfect time to celebrate, celebrate the birth of the greatest country that has ever been on the planet, and to reflect on the ideals and the principles of our birth.

To remember our history as a people and where we came from, to figure out where we are going.

History is hard, it is not easy, there is so much information out there, almost as much as in politics with all of our silly labels.  And all the different political theories.

But it is never more important, the History of who we are, of where we have come from.  History is the most important subject in the world.

So celebrate, remember, reflect, and honor the sacrifice of our founders and what they gave us.

And then promise to be better in the service and the defense of our liberty then we were in the past.

What this Country Needs Right now….is a Doctor

Or about three hundred million of them.

This is a reference to the pop culture icon…from England :P….Doctor Who.  There was a moment in one of the episodes that the Doctor’s arch nemesis came back from the dead and rose to become the Prime Minister of Great Britain.  And he said this:

This country has been sick.  This country needs healing.  This country needs medicine.  In fact, I’d go so far as to say that, what this country really needs, right now…is a doctor.

Harold Saxon.

And then there was this clip, that I rather enjoyed, from another Doctor Who episode.

Ladies and gentlemen.  This country has a fever, we have been sick, we need healing, we desperately need healing, what we in fact need, is a Doctor.

But we cannot wait for one.

We cannot wait for one.

Sure we have inspirations, we have people out there on the fore front, we have people who we need to look up to and respect.  But in the end we need a Doctor.

We need to become the Doctor.  Not necessarily the more violent aspects of the character, but the more peaceful.  The morality, the determination, the passion, the fire that he will do right no matter what the cost.

Craziness optional.

Believe me I know about becoming, or trying to become a better person.  I, personally think its something we all struggle with.  Though if someone out there that does not struggle with this…call me.

Or we need to become George Washington, or John Adams, or George Whitfield.

It does not really matter who.  But we must be these heroes.  We must pick a person that we think embodies the best qualities in life if we hope to succeed.

I have talked about heroes before, and how they are not always perfect people, none of us can be.  But we need to pick those qualities that we admire in the people who we admire and expand them in our selves.

Hope, charity, truthfulness, thrift, ruggedness.

We must become those people.  We must become the ‘Sainted Physicians’ and the George Washington’s of our time, all of us…or most of us in our own way.

We must do this because the enemy that we are fighting will take nothing less to defeat then all of us going at it, united.

We must be angry, we must be indignant, not engage ourselves in violence, but in peace and use that energy for…the light side of the Force.

That is required of us, gang buckle up, it will be a bumpy ride.

Andrew Jackson Vs. John Adams Vs. Barrack Obama.

A long time ago during senior year I was having a conversation between me and two other people in my high school,   right before the election.  And we were…well talking about the election.

The subject came up on which kind of President that you would have wanted to have, someone who was an ‘elitist’ like John Adams, who basically knew what they were doing, or a rabble rousing country rouser like Andrew Jackson.

Now I do disagree with some of the assertions made, but that is not really the point.  Oh and by the way, Barrack was being compared to John Adams in this specific metaphor.

But I do want to make two points about this.

First off, I do not really think John Adams was an elitist, just a flawed man in many ways.  Second of all, I do not personally care, you can be a country bumpkin, you can be an idiot, you can be from Harvard or Yale, as long as you live out your oath that you took to support and defend the constitution of the United States of America.

That is it, that is all I want, as long as one understands the concept of living and let living, I could care less whether you are an elitist or not…though part of the definition of being an elitist is a busy body that likes to stick their noses…where they do not and should not belong.

Second off, I think she has it backwards.  Andrew Jackson is President Obama, and John Adams was the old guard and rigid McCain…in this analogy.

Now, often people who are not really for the people, use the people to try to gain their power.  To tell them that they are being screwed by a group of politicians that are currently in office, and that they the people should rise up, demand their rights, and give the power to someone with better guards.  Not to say that this is inherently bad, it’s actually healthy, but it has been what…lesser politicians…have done to get elected in the past.

Using the people as a wagon to get into office, and rallying the ‘populist masses’.

Also around that time the politics of the situation were a mess.  The franchise had not yet been extended yet to all the adults of the nation, just land owners, so he had them on his side.

The last election had some questionable results. When John Quincy Adams was accused of ‘buying’ the election by offering one of his opponents a sweet heart deal so that he could be the winner.

He was a much hated President in certain areas that let Jackson draw a difference between himself, and the ‘politics of the past’ especially in regards to the franchise.

And when Jackson got into office he: Bullied the Supreme Court, expanded the powers of the Federal Government, fought actively with John Calhoun on issues of States Rights at a time when our country was rapidly heading for civil war.

Doesen’t this all sound just a little familiar?

This also brings up one great and important lesson in history to me.  Great men do not make great Presidents, in fact it takes only a very special kind of man to successfully be a President.  So much so that when I look back I can only think of two, maybe three Presidents that truly fit that bill.  Most of them were just adequate, doing their jobs, or much worse.

People like John Adams, who was a founding father, and rabble-rouser, and one of the people who fought hardest for independence from Great Britain.  But yet passed many laws in his administration that did not sit well with being so early in the Republic’s life.

Andrew Jackson, the hero of the battle of New Orleans.

Theodore Roosevelt, who led the charge up the San Juan hill, and whose philosophies were mostly right, just not when applied to government.

And then you have someone like Abraham Lincoln who lived his life, and then failed many times, before he became one of the most beloved Presidents in our nations history, for saving the Union.

I do not care what you are, you can be smart, or stupid, as long as you leave me with me and mine.  It takes extraordinarily special, but yet regular people to realize this.