I read a couple of articles this week that give a good indication of where our society now stands. Are we really the land of the free and the home of the brave? Does the average American even care any more?
The sooner that we can get more people disconnected from the normal inputs (TV, mainstream media, etc.), the sooner we can chart a course back to freedom. Yes, back to freedom…
In case you are just waking up, this great country of ours is no longer the great host of freedom that it once was. Linked below are two articles that put this point up in high relief.
Rick Fisk does an excellent job outlining the FLDS situation in Texas. Here is a snippet:
The raid, executed by machine gun-toting, tank-driving county Sheriffs ripped 416 children away from their mothers so that the State child “protective” services could question them and discover whether or not they were being abused. There are some beginning to question whether the state’s action was itself abuse, but these are like cries in the wilderness.
“These are like cries in the wilderness”. Do you know what a cry in the wilderness sounds like? Exactly. No one is listening. No one in the press even begins to question whether this raid was a mistake. No one questions whether this is the proper use of state force. What do we see? We see people who are weird and who are doing something we find repulsive. We have no problem when the state acts in aggression against people who are not like us.
Rick continues and drives home another great point about this travesty in Texas. Who is paying for the raid? Texas taxpayers. Who is paying for the attorneys for each of these 416 kids? Texas taxpayers. Who is paying for their ‘child protective services’ while the case gets ironed out? Texas taxpayers. Who was paying the FLDS men so they could afford so many wives and children?
Interesting question… You’ll never hear it asked on TV or in the major newspapers. It is good enough for us to be spurned to disgust by the polygamy. It is good enough for us to accept this as normal action for the state. Here is Fisk with the answer:
The FLDS church has skirted the polygamy laws – not that the laws are legitimate – by avoiding the marriage license. Fine. The state may not recognize unlicensed marriage, but they also have no legitimate legal authority to turn a religious institution into a “legal” institution. However, the FLDS goes a step further by having the “unwed” mothers apply for state welfare. They don’t just want to live their lifestyle in peace, they want to have the people of the State of Texas pay so that they can afford to maintain so many wives and children. [link in original]
If you are outraged by the behavior of the FLDS men at Yearning For Zion ranch, you should be outraged by this aspect alone. The rest of their behavior is clearly allowable by our Constitution and Bill of Rights. Oh, and if there has been forced sex with minors, how about we gather a little more evidence and get a warrant. The simplest thing that could have been done to impact the FLDS is, as Fisk says, to turn off their funding.
The second article that provoked similar pondering on my part is a piece written by J.H. Huebert discussing the impact our government is having on an ancient cultural tradition in a foreign country. Here is Huebert on the use of coca leaves in Peru:
Consumed in leaf form, coca has many beneficial effects: It not only relieves altitude sickness, it’s also good for general aches and pains and minor digestive disorders. Like green tea, its benefits seem endless, its drawbacks, none.
Or rather, the drawbacks would be none, except that cocaine, a small amount of which is contained in the leaf, is a drug upon which the U.S. and United Nations have declared war. That means an integral part of the lives of countless indigenous Andean people is under fire from fixated foreigners.
Most recently, the U.N. told South American governments that they should criminalize the traditional use of the coca leaf. Peru’s lawmakers, however, heroically rejected that demand, and dozens of legislators chewed coca leaves on the floor of the Peruvian Congress in protest.
Congresswoman Hilaria Supa told reporters, “The coca leaf has existed for thousands and thousands of years. It’s part of our agriculture, our food and our medicine. It’s sacred. The United Nations doesn’t know our culture. It doesn’t understand our values.”
The U.N.’s outrageous demand is a relatively minor insult compared with our government’s aggressive anti-coca campaign over the past several decades directed against its own citizens.
I encourage you to read his full article to get a better feel for this issue. The part that made me think of this in light of the Fisk’s FLDS article is in Huebert’s conclusion:
Why would Americans want to force our own failed experiments in drug prohibition on other nations? Maybe it’s because many among us believe we’re better than “those people.”
Here we have that same meme. Those people are weird or different. State action is acceptable because they are doing something that we disagree with or are disgusted by.
At what point did personal private behavior become the concern of the central governments? We have no trouble answering that question when we think of the old Soviet Union or perhaps other more outwardly socialistic societies. We have a lot of difficulty seeing it in our own country and governance.
These two articles made me wonder how long it will be before I am considered weird and one of “those people”. How many of us are a phone call away from experiencing the rough side of the states authority?
