Securing Safety in the Modern Age

“Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)

Our nation was built by those willing to risk all for the hopes of a better life.  Our past generations risked their lives to leave the oppressive hierarchy of Europe, where the divine right of kings and queens could not be questioned.  Where the hopes of better lives rested with the decisions of a removed and stratified upper class.  Where religious freedom was subject to the whims of whatever church was in power and where war and the sacrifices of the common man were frequently demanded.

For generations of Americans, we risked everything in the hopes of providing a future that was ours to build.  We traveled across the raging oceans and in the process settled on land where opportunity offered something our ancestors could not imagine, freedom to choose.  Of course, in the process, we made many selfish and morally questionable choices.  But the morality of those choices is only now apparent when we reflect back on them with the luxury of second-guessing those choices made when daily survival was a real concern.

We displaced a race of people who had themselves immigrated a thousand years earlier.  We fought them, conquered them, and placed them onto reservations.  We made promises we would routinely break for we are greedy people.  Now the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of those peoples are beginning to gain a stake in our prosperity as they feed off that same human greed with the creation of gambling centers.

We grew our nation on the backs of slaves brought to our shores by those willing to profit off the trafficking of human beings sold into lives of servitude where their lives were viewed as little more important than the animal stock that constituted the wealth of the farmers and plantation owners who owned them.  We’ve not changed dramatically in the idea that it is okay to traffic in human beings as that is still a major enterprise in most of the world, including here in the Americas.

In the course of our growth into a nation, with our own national identity, we created a document that has withstood the changes of 230 years.  A document, which created the framework for a limited government, by the men who dared to write a previous document that stated our rights came not from government but from God when we told the King of Great Britain to take a hike. 

As more individuals of our nation reject the idea of God as the source of our rights, then it would seem inevitable they believe the power of government must come from them.  That the power of government is only limited by their willingness to stand against the wrongs of government overreach.  But what if their fears of the unknown outweigh their fear of government?  What then?

Let’s take a look at our current pandemic, and how it differs from previous pandemics.

First, we now have experts.  Not that we didn’t have experts before, but now we have a whole industry of experts on the television almost non-stop telling us how expert they are and how we need to believe them or we are all going to die.  In past pandemics, we would get snippets of advice and the media supporting the government would feed it to us in dribs and drabs.  Now we have them giving it to us in fear-producing bucketsful to convince us this pandemic is far worse than all the other pandemics around.

Of course, there may be an underlying motivation in a lot of these experts or the media channels that push them out to us.  We would have to be insane if we didn’t realize this, but then the fear of death can certainly push that insanity aside for a while.  For the past four years now, the political pundits on ABCNNBCBS and MSNBC have been vilifying the President while glorifying the professional politicians and bureaucrats that make up the core of the government in Washington DC.  Despite all the implications of fraud and deceit coming out of investigation after investigation the most we’ve seen about real punishment have been a couple of forced retirements.  This doesn’t count the cases the professional politicians and bureaucrats have brought against the Trump administration and the President himself.  But let’s focus on the impeachment for a minute.

As hard as the Democrats tried they could not come up with a criminal event to hang their impeachment on.  Two years of investigations came down to “an abuse of power” impeachment demonstrating it was a purely political exercise bound to fail in a Senate trial.  Then along came the Wuhan Virus, Chinese Virus, Corona Virus, or COVID-19 virus (take your pick).   

To keep us all safe from the dangers of a virus that threatened to kill us all we’ve shut down the economy.  I have a friend, who at the beginning of this said, “I’ll take this seriously when they close Disney World.”  The next day they announced its closure.  Even as they closed you could sense the panic being raised as they were widely criticized for having one last party on the last Sunday they were open.

At first, the administration was condemned for acting too hastily and when that proved not to be a good argument the drumbeat changed to not taking the virus seriously enough.  The governors demanded actions, the administration scrambled to meet their needs, but always with the political experts offering their political opinions, and the medical experts (both known and unknown) offering their scientific opinions.  Along the way we, as a population has had very little to say about what we should or should not do.  Of course, we are not experts in anything other than living our lives.  For the most part, we don’t make grand decisions that affect more than a few dozen lives and for that we are grateful.

But we’ve become a nation where half of us are willing to condemn the other half of us simply because we disagree with their political views.  Thanks to the internet and applications like Twitter® and Face Book® we can scream to the world all that is wrong with those other guys and why we must listen to this or that half of our politicians/media experts.

Now that we have surrendered our independence for the promised safety from this virus, how exactly will we regain it?  In looking at the roles of our politicians it appears to me that some are unwilling to give it back.  Of course, they are doing this in the name of keeping us safe.  Then we have those who would steal our independence because they are above the purview of our laws, how will we change that if we can’t agree even on the most obvious of points that individual liberty is the foundation of this nation.