Happy 4th Of July

Enjoy your 4th of July holiday. Hopefully, you're not working today.

If you're reading this as a citizen of the United States of America, (or you're one of the 40M illegal leaches already here who's crashed the party), you're living in the freest and most prosperous country on the planet, bar none. We know this, because the garbage rafts are never rowed to socialist paradises like Cuba or Venezuela.

This reality mightily irritates those determined to boo that parade, including the lunatics at both ends of our own political spectrum, but it is nonetheless true, so I like to point it out just to piss them off today. Mud in your eye, @$$holes!

If anyone thinks differently, I'd advise them that multiple carriers have connecting flights to anywhere else they'd rather live, and the door at Customs & Immigration swings both ways, so I'd remind them not to let it hit them in the ass on their way out.

Anyone who hasn't availed themselves of that option proves the falsehoods they would mutter, which is why the gradeschool playground logic of "Oh yeah? Then why aren't you there?" is all one needs to make the point.

That being said, this country is nowhere near as free as it once was, even if it is more prosperous.

An average citizen here in 1800 would go years, decades even, without seeing one single minion of the federal government, anywhere, not only his entire day, but for his entire life.

There were no cops walking beats, any place. The standing army was a couple of thousand guys in a couple of forts. If you weren't coming in on a ship, there were no government agents waiting for you, and no daily, weekly, monthly, nor annual taxes to pay. For anyone.

You woke up and moved in a cocoon of total liberty hindered only by laws at all against egregious law-breaking like robbery, theft, battery, or murder.

Your only contact with the government at all, was when you cast your vote every two years for the lone person you had heard of with any federal connection at all, and the only one you voted into office: your congressweasel. (Yes, they were weasels then too.) And once every fourth year, voting for a president, whose effect on your life, by and large, was slightly less than that of a Prom King or Queen of the May nowadays.

That was it.

(And if you had the misfortune to have been brought here in chains, and working a plantation from Maryland south, you didn't vote at all. That brought its own problem set, presently, but you were a fractional exception to the national rule.)

You could wander wherever you had a mind, and never break a single law in anything you did, anywhere.

In fact, you could walk from one coast to the other, and your biggest problem would be Indians, and disease, not the government. Even if you wandered into French or Spanish territory on your trek towards the Pacific.

You could just shoot a deer, or buffalo, and eat it. You wouldn't find many fencelines east of the Appalachians, and damned few streets or houses either. Also precious few maps, no bridges, and not much for roads either. And the trip, at best, would be at your best speed on horseback or wagon.

The convenience of highways, bridges, railroads, telegraph, then telephone, air travel, and internet (to say nothing of health codes and modern medicine), have made Indians and disease a negligible worry, and the trip can be made individually in days, or by air in hours.

In return for which, the blanket of individual liberty we once had as our birthright has been replaced by a cocooning web of government, government, and yet more government, which, like all spiders, wraps up its prey securely in order to suck it dry.

Not all progress has been positive, and what made it easier for you to go from the Atlantic to the Pacific has also made it far too easy for government to spread like a malignant cancer, and intrude its big nose and ravenous maw into everything in your life, every purchase or sale you make, and everything you do, including what lightbulb snaps on when you flip a switch, or what type of toilet you may now flush.

Blacks are no longer slaves on Southern plantations. Instead we all are, working annually the equivalent of January to June just to satisfy the recockulous demands on our labors and wealth made by actual armies of local, county, state, and federal versions of the cancer. (No small part of it paid in protection money as welfare, to keep the shiftless descendants of slaves from rioting from coast to coast, for those who aren't already enjoying extended government room and board of an entirely different type, in the local grey bar motel.)

This, none of it, was surely not what the Founders intended, for anyone. And yet, here we are.

So as you enjoy your God-given rights today to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, baseball double-headers, hot dogs, and sales on automobiles and big screen TVs, coupled hopefully with a spectacular fireworks show in honor of that liberty, ponder what you've lost, how you might get some of it back, and what you'll do to instill the desire for liberty to your offspring, and succeeding generations, that they might have more than the shadow of freedom we presently find allotted to us.

Pretty much anything you can do to kill the cancer that's spoiling the party today would be fair game. So plot a little, talk a little treason over a mug at the tavern, and see if you can't figure out whose tea to throw into the harbor, and whose minions you might tar and feather and run out of town on a rail, to mess up their plans and curb their domain year over year.

It's a tradition as American as fireworks and picnics today, and far healthier to the republic than getting a new big screen TV. We are a race of malcontents, thrown out of every civilized country, and dumped here to tame a continent. Anyone whose natural recourse is to run to the government every waking minute ought to be viewed with innate suspicion and reviled with undisguised loathing. And gifted with no small amount of rotten fruit and eggs at whatever speed your arm can manage. (Including, at last count, 21 Democrat candidates for president next November.) Imagine the salutary effect on the republic if their motorcades were thusly pelted from city to city unceasingly for the next 16 months.

Liberty is your birthright. Secure its blessings to yourselves, and your posterity.
Fill your powder horn, clean your muskets, and put a vat of tar on to simmer. Just in case the opportune moment arises. What cannot continue, will not.