Simple Choices

Look, it’s pretty simple.

Our government is only as good as the protection it provides to us. That’s the reason we have a government in the first place.

History proves that some governments haven’t always been founded in the defense of average people. In fact some past governments were designed only to protect those who governed. That situation always left average people scrambling to fend for themselves.

But that’s not what the American experiment is about.

In this republic we don’t expect neighbors, farmers, business owners or school administrators to keep us safe from anything much less safe from ourselves. Individuals, acting freely upon their own desires, are not bound to keep common interests in mind while exercising the profound liberties which are at the core of our beliefs.

We elect our representatives to enact laws designed to keep us safe. We fund police forces and a judiciary to enforce those laws and maintain order. We establish a national military to defend us from external enemies and we create state guards to defend us from within if the need arises. We collectively train and equip large agencies of public servants to ensure fairness, equality and safety in every corner of our country.

We, the people of this nation, are and always have been the deciders. We oversee and fund the whole deal. We empower our representatives to take care of this business of protection. Our founding fathers chose long ago to place individual liberty in the highest regard and relegate our collective defense to the concern of our caretakers. Even the arming of our population was at first designed more as a bulwark against tyranny rather than as a promise of individual safety.

So today we may be held hostage to our concept of personal liberty.

When we can’t go to work, go to school, or even wake up in our own beds without wondering where the next attack will come from, then this concept has failed us. When all our laws, our police, and our courts can’t keep lethal weapons out of the hands of rogue malcontents, violent criminals and psychotic nut-jobs, then this system has failed us. When our own representative decisions regularly come back to haunt us, when things are not fair for the majority, when protective equality is only enjoyed by a minority and when we all are constantly on guard then our government has failed us.

Judging current events, we could say our government fails to keep us safe and in many ways we have allowed it to fail.

Now we may have another simple choice to make.

As the deciders, we can end the experiment. We can take back the responsibility of our own individual safety. We can unfurl our “Don’t Tread on Me” flags in each yard and build fortified walls around every town square. We can take individual liberty to its extreme end point. We can arm every man, woman and child in this country to defend against the rogue malcontents, violent criminals and psychotic nut-jobs who lurk in our society. We can give up on the repeated failures of our institutions and go back to the time when governments only existed to defend and enrich themselves.

Or, as the deciders, we can start over. We can demand that the system adapts to more adequately meet our present needs. We can elect fresh representatives who see it as most of us see it. We can change the laws. We can thoughtfully write over the anachronistic constitutional explanations for the rights, privileges, and benefits of responsible citizenship in our nation. We can devote more time, effort and resources to enforcing newer laws. We can take lethal weapons from the hands of those who only want to harm us. We can say a “well-regulated militia” is still important, in the sense that all citizens may form a militia against potential tyranny, but that the regulations in question should be more tightly defined and more strictly controlled. We can choose to sacrifice some old concept of individual liberty for the modern higher price of collective security. We can restate the declaration of our independence to explain that there’s no bestowed right enjoyed by a few which outweighs the beneficial safety of the many.

Or we can just lock our doors, draw our curtains, return to warily minding our own peaceful business and hope our mercenaries of democracy someday do the job we hired them to do.

The choice seems simple. Doesn’t it?

Cheers,

Mb