Wednesday, July 1, 2009

Dead Bees Can Still Sting


I am fast reaching the conclusion that all governments are crude, hollow, oafish, unimaginative, simple-minded, heavy-handed… you get the idea. Right, Left, Far Right, Far Left, Right of Center, Left, Left of Center, it doesn’t matter which. The only thing that separates good government from bad government is its size. By that standard, we are all collectively marching in the wrong direction.

I once worked quite regularly with a man from Bangladesh at very close quarters (in an armored truck). We got to know each other quite well. Moh’d was a good man; smart; hard-working; dependable. Once a year he’d deliberately starve himself in deference to some religious festival and the blood would drain from his face. By the end of the day, he was so weak, he could no longer drive. Someone else would take over the wheel and we’d make it back to base in good order.

We talked about many things. A favorite topic of his was immigration and borders. One day he said something profound. I sloughed it off at first but it stayed with me and I was compelled to reconsider. “Perhaps the whole problem with everything is borders,” he said.

Unfortunately, we’ve consigned the protection of (often unnatural) borders to government with the understanding that government that does everything badly. As such, it tends to get us into wars which, every one agrees, invariably end badly for all. Now we find ourselves at a precipice with government making a serious bid to take over everything from what we eat to how we flush our toilets.

Some are only now starting to recognize the danger of incompetent or even nefarious government taking over every aspect of our lives. We find that government often has the earmarks of a cancer that, if left to metastasize, will kill the patient.

It’s no wonder that some of us have begun shouting hysterically for others to wake up. What to do? We are not a violent people; we are not a banana republic. As such, we must pin our hopes on passive aggression. We must starve the beast.

We recognize that government is a lot better organized than we are. We must organize as well. It needs to go beyond organizing tea parties on the fourth of July. We already have a sense of what we must do. We must prepare now to vote everyone – Republican and Democrat alike – out of office when the time comes. We must derail their shameless gravy train. It won’t be pretty. They’ll squeal like stuck pigs for they’ve come to feel entitled to their leadership (such as it is). We too will suffer; there’s still a lot they can do to hurt us. A dead bee can still sting. But we absolutely must take our nation back. There simply is no alternative.

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