An idiot's crisis

Many people come to crisis in the world we live in. Crises often occur when we least expect them, and the most troubling of these is crises of conscience. I am suffering one such, having read through numerous other websites of late, some of which I will be discussing shortly, and old books, magazines, newspapers.

What is real and what is not is always subject to interpretation. Courts exist to try to try criminals, to determine contracts and their real intent, and to attempt to hold the rule of law to our society. Today you're going to read one idiot's take on the law.

Our rule of law was specifically designed to avert tyranny.
We established the rule of law, not for the purposes of simple security against outside forces, but also against inside forces. Perhaps we remember that Concorde and Lexington both were sites of armories, and increasing encroachments of the British brought their armies to bear to collect those arms, as they were effective means of defense against the governmental and private excesses of powerful forces from Britain and elsewhere. A fuller picture can be understood by reading the writings of John Locke, Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, James Madison, and others, reading the newspapers of the time, and exploring the groundwork that was discussed in the Constitutional Convention itself.

The purpose of the constitution was not merely to establish a new government, but reading in its preamble, to establish the benefits of liberty for our founders, and all their posterity. They had numerous blind spots, none the least of which was the view among some that people with different colored skins were not human. They had a revolutionary vision, a vision of establishing a government where tyranny could not exist. A good many of them knew that this establishment would require the ending of slavery, and the ending of tyranny against all persons, regardless of how they were situated. They established the constitution of the United States to these ends.

Several of the states would not ratify the constitution without further assurances from the government. The Federalist Papers discussed the bills of rights in the Federalist 84, and proposed that such a bill of rights would be dangerous, as it would focus people upon what was enumerated, and people would forget the things not listed. Hamilton claimed in those writings that there were no powers granted to do such things, and thus proposing guards against things that could not be would suggest that the government had power to do them.

We live in a very different world today, a world where government power is near unlimited. This blog is designated to expose tyranny, of as many sorts as possible, and to expose them to the light and burn away the shadows hiding them. This idiot will be your guide in a changing, shadowy world, where your history may not be your own, and the truth is as ephimeral as the morning dew.

Obvious tyrannies are easy to look at, emotionally charged tyrannies far more difficult. Let's remove the blinders from your eyes, shall we? Anything our nation does to any citizen, can be done to all citizens. Anything our nation does to noncitizens in our name, can be done to our citizens. We are the guardians, and the supervisors of our nation, and it is by our authority, our power, and our supervision that they claim to do the things they do.

Did you vote for torture for persons in Guantanamo bay? Did you vote for the abuses in Abu Ghraib? Did you vote for the ability of the president to make legislation, prohibited by the Constitution? Did you vote for the ability of the congress to force you into mandatory identification cards that they can track anywhere you go? Did you vote for zoning ordinances to tell you what you can, and can't do with your land? Did you vote for the ability of the IRS to take your property at any time on suspicion of wrongdoing, without any legal process or necessity of return due to fraud or mistake?

Did you vote for making people homeless, for bailing out big businesses, for making reserve monetary systems that do nothing save making the rich richer, and the poor poorer? Did you vote to allow other nations to leverage the national parks, national parks you own, in order to support a growing and topheavy national debt?

Did you vote to support thousands of industries dumping the costs of their retirement upon your backs, upon your children and grandchildren, costs that cannot be borne or paid? Did you vote yourselves into servitude for the very government that is supposed to serve you?

Or... did they usurp these powers? Did they take them, pull them away from their rightful owners, and give them to themselves as a gift? Tyranny begets tyranny, and the greatest tyranny of all is the idea that any group has the power, the right, or the authority to take away the rights of others for the 'greater good'.

Isn't it interesting how so many disasters lead to greater power for the president, the congress, and external governments? Isn't it curious that the military is augmented repeatedly, and stationed on our own soil to preserve 'order' at the cost of liberty, at gunpoint?

Of course, they could never be used against us... to say so would be the rankest folly! After all, no government in history ever used their legitimate military against their own people. No elected leader ever became a despot... and we're too educated to ever elect someone because they present themselves well rather than for their actual qualifications. There's never been anyone manipulating ballots, or playing games with the electorate, no faithless electors, no bribery, coercion, or blackmail. Such things just don't happen in our nation, right?

Or have we closed our eyes in this nation so much that it seems a truism of life now? From the firefighters in Chicago in the 1800s, the militarization of the police today, the strongarm tactics back then assuring a 'proper' vote (on penalty of pain or death), police investigating themselves, and the rule of law breaking down farther as the police use fear to try to gain respect?

You don't gain respect through fear, you gain respect through constancy, through honesty, through compassion, through strength, through learning how not to exercise the powers you hold when they are not needed. You gain respect, and the rule of law, not through criminalizing things, but through working out ways to make the law even, level, and powerful, while still being human.

We have no right, power, or authority to regulate away the right to life, to liberty, to property, or to the ability to defend any of those, all of them, against tyranny.

Any idiot can understand that.