Minor Thoughts from me to you

Our government (Joe and I are both Americans, if it wasn't completely obvious) is the world's oldest. Economically, we account for a quarter of the world's entire gross domestic product - which is a fact that tends not to be mentioned when activists bemoan the fact that we consume a quarter of the world's usable oil ("To each according to his need," we might reply to them). Relatively-speaking, citizens have more economic and social freedoms in the United States than any of their ancestors could imagine, and they have responded by being one of history's most generous people both in charity and in warfare.

There's a lot to celebrate. And maybe that's why the Unites States' citizens don't seem to understand what a pickle they're really in. Drunk with the glory produced by their ancestors, our fellow Americans fail to realize just how much danger they're really in.

Because they are in a bad state (no pun intended). They are broke. Worse, they are heavily, heavily in debt, and their government representatives are unwilling to even arrest their descent into financial ruin, much less lead them out of it, because Americans have been successfully fooled into accepting a paradigm of government known as the "two-party system". So long as Republican officials keep their voters scared of Democrats and Democrat officials keep their own scared of Republicans, both sides are aware they will never be held accountable for their actions. Bizarrely, they can take money from anyone - even the Iranian government - and then do favors for those financiers just as blatantly once they enter office, just so long as they tell the IRS about it.

Keeping their electorate scared of foreign agents has completed their stranglehold on the minds of their subjects ("constituents" is too polite a word at this stage). Somehow, they have successfully convinced over half of the U.S.A. that their personal security demands the continual presence of at least one million soldiers stationed inside their national borders, as well as many more on 820 different bases in over 39 different countries - this despite America's own constitution fairly clearly (though admittedly not completely unambiguously) rejecting the notion of a standing army entirely. The total cost for it all constitutes 21% of annual discretionary spending by their Congress.

They have also convinced many of their fellow citizens that their freedoms are subject to their own "compelling interest" - that is, the level of trouble the government would have in respecting rights to free speech, property, and privacy. The Supreme Court has ruled that governments may indeed abridge political speech (McCain-Feingold Act), take your property (Kelo), or wiretap you (President Obama is now legalizing what his predecessor illegally performed) without judge approval - which as it turns out is a rubber stamp anyway, as citizens are learning across the nation at the most local levels when they challenge police harassment. Inform a policeman that you don't consent to a search or that you are not interested in answering his/her questions and you can be arrested on any number of absurd new catch-all charges.

Indeed, so fragilely do your personal freedoms rest on the government's whims that it has been clearly established by federal judges - and I swear I am not making this up - that you do not actually have a legal right to your own urine or blood and that you cannot put in your body what you want (but then, all you "drug war"-lovers do know about that one, don't you?).

Strip away the paeans to public health and morality and you are left with the central message at the heart of it all: other people own you.

I would say these are the problems with the services our government is providing today - except that they aren't really "services" at all, are they? A favor must by nature be refusable, but should you refuse services the government is not adequately providing - and most certainly if you stop paying for them - you will be met by its mercenaries, men in blue uniforms inexplicably thought as heroes, who will use their guns and clubs to make you pay or else throw you in a cage.

Don't want to fight the Iraqis? You must still at least pay for the guns or you will go to prison.

Don't want government health care? You must buy health care - or you will go to prison.

Don't want to pay for other people's care/education/unemployment/retirement? You must - or you will go to prison.

Don't like how we're literally stealing your money? Pay anyway - or you will go to prison.

Don't want to do something as simple as wear you seat belt? You must, or you will get a ticket - and if you don't pay even that, yes, you will eventually go to prison.

And again, most Americans are OK with it.

In the main, that is because Republican and Democrat officials have successfully fooled the electorate into forgetting why the United States was a great idea in the first place - something that has nothing to do with Democracy or a Republic. Democracies and republics are not especially fantastic forms of government. The former are rule-by-mob and the latter are rule-by-mob with a couple levels of safeguards.

What was absolutely crazy about the U.S.A. was the notion (far from fully-developed though it was) that a person had a respected right to largely live life as he or she chose, _irrespective _of what his or her fellow citizens thought. That was the Big Idea, the Lightning Bolt, the historically uique factor, what made it a hundred times cooler than Greece thousands of years past and France just across the way. Yes, the Founding Fathers failed to initially apply that idea to all people - but that was because some failed to regard women and ethnic minorities as people, not because they didn't understand that people in general should make their own choices. That's a shame, but it's still a fabulous seed of an idea, largely alien to human history.

In fact it's great - and if the United States of America wishes to remain so or even reach still mightier heights, its citizens must recall the seed from which they sprung and rather than allow their leaders to whittle away at the tree of liberty grown from it, force them to allow its expansion.

Otherwise, the Declaration of Independence itself tells us what our next duty is:

"Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."

(PS: Boy, the Fourth of July really brings out the windbag in all of us writers, doesn't it? Well, the clock strikes midnight - back to sanity and hopefully some lower level of pretension!)