The Problem

You feel it, don’t you?

That slow, inexorable tightening of cold fingers around your throat?

You know something is wrong.

Every year ... every day ... comes that ever-tightening grip. Another indignity at the airport, and then on the highways ... and soon, coming to a mall or public building near you. Another tax, another law treating you like a child - all wrapped up in diapers from birth to death, just passed with smiles all around  by your ever-so-gracious masters in Washington ... all for your own good.

Maybe you’re just seeing it now. Or maybe you’ve seen this coming for decades, screaming about a broken budget and the oh-so-slow encroachment of stolen power for so long that your voice gave out, and you finally just accepted that when that boot on the face of humankind finally came crashing down, at least you could have the satisfaction of having been right all along.

So - now that your neighbors are up and awake, you’re moving again. Think you can pull it off? 
Maybe.

You’re nervous about next year, admit it. You’re afraid this year will be like all the others - that no matter what color of tie the lawmaker is wearing, no matter what the rhetoric, the ratchet will keep tightening. And then what happens?

I beg you to take another look at the stakes of the battle now.

What humanity is … what we will be … rests upon your shoulders. You are playing for literally the highest stakes in the history of humanity. 

Again and again, I’m trying to drive the point home ... this isn’t forever. This is not some holding-the-tide-forever thing like the Free State Project. It's not trying to save the world. It has a single, quantifiable goal: hold out local sovereignty and American ideals instead of global sovereignty and transnational/European ideals for our posterity. That's it.


Do you understand yet?

All around you, the net is tightening. Across the ocean and here at home, governments are coalescing. Trade agreements are strengthening into regulatory bodies. As our trade increases, as our communication draws us ever closer together, so too is that siren call echoing around the world: 

 “Be a global citizen. Have a planetary consciousness.  Give up notions of nationality, of independence, of sovereignty...“

 “Assimilate.”

 “Oh, wear your national colors on your sleeve if you must ... but think like us. Believe like us. Play by our rules. Don’t earn too much. Don’t achieve too much. Just be a good little drone, pay your taxes, watch your TV, and let your American nationality become in time no more meaningful than a football team jersey as the world tightens ever closer together.

“Forget what it means to live free.”

That time is coming. The footsteps of its approach echo more loudly in the halls of power every year. With every day that closes, the net squeezes tighter ... and soon it will close. If not in your time, then in that of your children.

They will grow up, never knowing even the shreds of inherited liberty that you may once have taken for granted.

That’s the fate of humanity. It’s inevitable, isn’t it? Resistance is futile, we're told. That ship has sailed.

Maybe you can win an election here, a fight there. Maybe you can hold back the tide for one more generation, but no matter how hard you fight, it’s always seemed the best you could achieve was to slow the tide.

How much longer, you’ve wondered, will we even remember what it was to be Americans?

Americans.

Americans have always been a breed apart. We’ve grown up with tales of the pioneers ringing in our ears. Stories of settlers surviving horrific winters on the New England coast, choosing the desperate circumstances of the American wilderness rather than surrender the right to worship … or just to live … as they choose. Our nearer ancestors rode the plains on horseback and in covered wagons, living a life of deprivation and hardship - but still a life more free than could be had in the growing cities of the East.

Who among us hasn’t been enchanted by the strong cowboy astride his horse, the pioneer? Do you think those folks wanted to be herded in by a nanny government?

Americans have always sought - and fought for - freedom. Build a fence on one side and an American will climb it, tunnel under it, go around it, or simply go another way. That’s not likely to change anytime soon. We are the dreamers. The doers. We are the restless energy that drives ever onward.

Much of the American dream, and its literature for the last century, have been looking forward to a time when humans move outward again ... this time, into the Solar System.

Some day... maybe a century or two, maybe more, maybe less ... SOMEONE is going to step out of a lander and onto the first permanent human colony away from Earth. Maybe Mars, maybe the moon. But eventually, one day, it will happen. And from that point, humanity will continue to spread out step by step into Infinity.

So here’s the question.

Will the person making that next small step know what Liberty means? Or will they be a product of a century or more of bureaucrats molding humanity into some perfect model, so tamed by the stultifying hand of the state that the very idea of freedom is some hollow word from the distant past?

What society will they build there? What could they build, a people raised expecting everything from the State? Would YOU pick a third- or fourth-generation welfare recipient to conquer Mars? What message would they spread? What society would they build ... could they build? 


Will our children live free?


Those are the stakes.


 
Not just your freedom here, now. Not just your flag and your country, as precious as those are. But what will humanity BE in a hundred years? Two hundred?

Some vision of humanity will spread beyond this one pale blue dot into the blackness. Will those people be serfs, bred for generations to a taming hand? Or will they be pioneers? What will they have been taught from childhood to treasure, and what will their children carry with them, into the black?

There are no higher stakes for a people ... for a species ... than these.

You have not been born out of time, my pioneering friend. You have not been born two hundred years too late, or two hundred years too early.

No, you been blessed with the opportunity to stand at the single greatest bottleneck of human history. For you are in a race. 

Will those who seek to tame humanity into a docile herd to be milked have us all in their soft, taming hands for generations? Or will we outrun them?

Are you ready?





 

Coming soon, in Part II:

A little over forty years ago, Ronald Reagan looked out across a little auditorium and gave a televised speech. For the first time - but not last - he took square aim at a totalitarian regime, looked out square over the gathered audience, and declared: 

“If we lose freedom here, there is no place left to run to. This is the last stand on earth.”

I am here to tell you, I believe Mr. Reagan may have been wrong. There is a place left to run. But it's not for everyone.



(This is part 1 of an essay jointly authored by Jenny S. and me, about a year ago.)