Freedom Is Really Only For A Few.

The rich and powerful of every political and religious stripe hate and fear nothing more than an informed and empowered populace. When reality is defined by what TV news-mongers and evangelists say, and your idea of "freedom" is a mortgage serviced by a rigorously demanding job, and the right to vote every four years for which of Massa Washington's boys gets to wear the Big Hat next, then the number of informed and empowered people is pretty small.

Most working-class Americans look to me like livestock on a treadmill with a feedbag and a virtual-reality hat over their eyes. Should we freedomists then strive to awaken and so liberate the sheep (like in the Matrix)? If you free sheep, they wander until led. They are still sheep, free or not. Most Americans have no idea what day-to-day freedom from their social and professional roles and responsibilities might really be like, and there is little they would do differently if offered unlimited freedom. We who exercise what we think should be freedom, outlawed or not, just learn to do it, living as outlaws among the lawfully ordered. It seems clear to me for that few who desire to exercise maximum freedom to still live in an affluent society, most of the people must prefer the ordered life, and must have that life. Whatever we revolutionaries do, it must not upset or disrupt the lives of the fat, dumb, and happy working middle class.

When a group of people are called "alternative" or "radical" or "fringe" that means most people are not that way, given freedom of choice or not. Obtaining a law by the vote of the majority which includes all of the fringe element is always going to be unlikely. It seems clear therefore that some of us are always going to be an "outlaw class" for exercising one freedom or other, and it is also clear that the form of order which best enables us outlaws to live among them as we wish is not the intolerant witch-hunting hangin-judge Conservative, but the more diverse and inclusive Liberal.

If what you want is to live a very free personal life, perhaps doing things others might not do, with a minimum of government intervention in your life, then it is clear to me you should vote for the most progressive Liberals, and then responsibly live your life, rather than submitting yourself to loyally following and enforcing a severe code of honor, duty, and accountability, and living the life of a slave at arms, as good soldiers do. If you want that kind of life, don’t vote Republican and start shooting at Senators, just go join the Marines. Really, I mean that. It is there such a self-sacrificing life of service is most valuable to our society, and most honorable, precisely because it enables the rest of us to live relatively libertarian and even libertine lives. To attempt to impose such a dutiful and puritan lifestyle on everyone, and to declare the freedoms being fought for should not be exercised, is a betrayal of those rights themselves.

A Marine says, “I give up my freedoms in order to give you freedom to do what I do not. I get up before the light so you can sleep till noon. I take orders and obey without question, so you can do nothing and serve no one. I am sober and straight, but I will kill for your right to suck a joint, whether that is somebody’s reefer or somebody’s cock. I will give my life to pay for the Food Stamps that keep your babies alive, even if they are all illegitimate. Though I may weep when my Flag touches the ground, I will stand for your right to….. aw, horsechester, I just can’t do it! There is a line I can’t cross, and that is it, bud. I won’t have no pinko, faggo, dope-smoking, butt-poking, baby pumping, border-jumping, freeloading Food Stamp fatsos and Medicaid junkies making a pack of glutted-out Wall Street billionaires even fatter on my ticket, and then burning my Flag bitching about it! Goddammit, there’s a point I just got to shoot somebody!”

Having been a Marine (and yes, you never recover), and also a libertine libertarian, I understand how being a Christian social conservative defending the Constitutional freedoms of a libertarian society is a bit like a monk who guards a whorehouse, and I also understand how unpleasant and unfree life can be when the Marine decides to impose his martial lifestyle and morality upon the house he guards. Be a Marine if you love that lifestyle, but vote Progressive for those whose freedom you defend.