by Peter Hendrickson of LOSTHORIZONS.COM
I really don’t want to make peevishness my theme for this newsletter. But I can’t help feeling both peevish and cynically amused at the huffing and puffing about “lines in the sand” by self-labeled “patriot” types in response to the latest gun-control threats.
To hear the fulminations of these ruffle-feathered folks, you’d think they have actually been shaken awake and are “up in arms” in some manner of speaking. The contemptible reality is that all this sturm und drang is pure posture. These folks who are loudly declaring that they will never give up their guns have actually been giving everything up for years, and there’s no reason to think they’ll stop now.
The record proves that while the guns of these posturing patriots may well only be “pried from their cold dead fingers”, the “cold and dead” will be from old age, not a firefight. After all, these are the same folks who won’t even risk an argument over who owns the fruit of their unprivileged labors, even with the law entirely on their side, and with the only thing needed from them being a written rebuttal of allegations that their receipts are proceeds from the specialized class of activities in which the feds have an ownership interest.
I’m very sorry to say it, but it is simply not possible to take seriously bold defiant noises about defending their Second Amendment rights to the death from people who won’t risk so little as a roll of their accountant’s eyes or the possibility of staring down a dark-eyed IRS for the sake of defending their right to all the rest of their property. And frankly, who cares whether these folks keep their guns, as long as they’re going to stand mute and motionless while every other vestige of liberty is stripped from them by the very parasites and tyrants against whom they cry defiance over possession of their rusty muskets?
THESE FOLKS ARE LIKE THE STATUES OF MINUTEMEN that decorate this once-great country. They are well-armed, but are really nothing more than shat-on pigeon-perches for all that.
The product of what energy these posturing patriots DO put into motion, in a natural and rightful effort to provide for themselves and their families, is diverted away from them in great gobs every week. When each year ends and they are asked to agree that the muggers have a right to keep the money (by declaring it to be “income” in the context of the tax) these hard-talkers turn to nervous sheep and just sign the form saying that they know and believe their earnings to be the federally-taxable-kind.
Then they go back to threatening with mayhem the gun-grabbers whose sustenance they just agreed to pay for. “Line in the sand”, my ass.
FURTHER, THE TALK-TALKERS AND NOT WALK-WALKERS don’t just quietly pay their persecutors (and pay them so well that the predator class lives MUCH more comfortably than the posturing prey). They also pay for the indoctrination of their children with the belief that the very real threat against which their parents so fiercely posture is not only no threat, but is the best of all possible things.
What’s more, the talk-and-no-walkers pay for the opening of their mail and the tapping of their phone-calls without warrants. Thus they facilitate the strong possibility that if they ever ARE moved to get up on their hind legs they will find it very difficult to do so en masse in a coordinated and effective way, because each who attempts to organize such a thing might well be singled out and overwhelmed one by one.
THE SAD FACT IS, THE ONLY “LINES IN THE SAND” these folks are drawing are ever-smaller circles around their otherwise inert and enervated selves. Outside these little “last straw” markers every last vestige of liberty is being corrupted and destroyed by enemies whose efforts are financed by these very same morons huddling in their “line-in-the-sand-castles” and daring their amused foes– who move freely about the wide-world taking everything else they want– to cross into their little prisons and take their guns.
It’s pathetic.
Lines in the sand? OK, they ARE lines in the sand– and that’s ALL they are. They are without substance, without solidity and without seriousness; easily drawn, shallow, and certain to fade into obscurity and irrelevance over time.
Our ancestors drew THEIR lines in STONE. Until just a few decades ago they kept their guns, and they kept their money and other property too. And they kept their privacy and their dignity. They did all the other things because by keeping their money in their own hands they kept the State too small to threaten any of their rights and only big enough to help them secure those rights.
Think about this as we proceed through this year’s season of truth or lies about who has an ownership interest in the product of our individual, unprivileged labor. Think about WHY the Founders went to the trouble of spelling out the law they imposed on the federal government, including the prohibition on gun-control, and recognize that it wasn’t because the sole metric of whether Americans remain free is their continued possession of guns.
