By Tim Lynch | September 23rd, 2021
| The Fair-Weather Patriot |
If those were the times that tried men’s souls, then what are these? A fair-weather patriot abandons the fight for liberty when challenges arise, choosing instead the easy and pacific bosom of centralized government. In this time of great consternation, who has the fortitude and virtue to defend Liberty just as intently through the dark of night as in the warmth and comfort of daylight? Without the torchlight cast by patriots in times of darkness, Liberty lies alone and defenseless in the wilderness of human experience, easily preyed upon by tyrants who take advantage of the shade of night to work their sinister machinations.
What, then, is the nature of the tyranny perpetrated against us now? Is it so different than it was when our founders and framers spoke out against the abuses of King George III? It turns out that while tyranny has an array of masks it can wear, the monster underneath is timeless and unchanging. The abuse of power is not a symptom, but rather the essential nature of power itself, inseparable from it and inevitable without constant checks. Power and those wielding it will not submit themselves to limitations voluntarily. This we learned once already as we waged war against a monarch in order to form a republican government founded entirely on the decentralization and distribution of power to the people.
| The Essential Nature of Liberty |
Liberty is as essential to humanity as the air we breathe. It is constant, unchanging, universal, and indelible. Once a soul has experienced freedom, it cannot be separated from it but upon the separation of the soul from the body. A person set free is like a person awoken, able finally to see the rewards of independence and the everlasting threats against it – able to see that the biggest threat to liberty is not the tyrants of the world, but the sleeping masses who enable them.
The American patriots of the 18th century believed that freedom and rights existed whether or not they were valued by the people or protected by the government, and that it was only through the actions of the people that the protection of our freedom and rights could be ensured. That is why they crafted our system of government with the intention of having ordinary people participate in their government. Our framers and founders, influenced by the writings of men like John Locke, believed that the only just form of government was a representative civil one. Theocracies rule through the iron will of dogma; monarchies rule through the iron fist of dictatorship; oligarchies rule through the corruption of the wealthy few; democracies rule through the absolute will of a simple majority. How, then, should people organize their governments to best preserve the rights of the individual from tyrants in their many forms?
To understand the essential nature of liberty, it must be understood that there are no collective rights – there are only individual rights. People don’t have rights; a person does, and each person has the same rights as every other person. Why is this distinction important? If everyone has the same rights, what is wrong with saying that “people” have a given right or another? The simple answer is that it sidelines the importance of the individual, who, in a free society, is the most important to protect. Each individual is born with the immediate ownership of property: Themselves. If a government like ours is established to protect life, liberty, and property, it is their absolute responsibility to defend the individual and the individual’s rights. An individual’s rights can be abridged or violated by any group larger than the individual, and there is no faster way to abridge an individual’s rights than to speak of some agreed-upon set of “collective” rights.
| Our New Crisis |
Trying times, indeed, have befallen us as threats to our liberty are daily and seem to go nearly unnoticed by the people of our nation. Worse still are the violations of our freedom that have been welcomed by the people with open arms in payment for some false sense of comfort and illusory safety. The crisis of our times lies in how we respond to the abusive overreach of our modern-day King George. Unlike the 1770s, it is not one man, the King of England, but a bureaucratic army two million strong that threatens our rights today. Any of the untold thousands of Executive Branch agencies of the Federal Government can, without recourse or oversight, choose at will to find any charge against a person that they wish to prosecute – a fact only truer today than it was in 1964 when Ronald Reagan spoke of it. Orders and directives from the unelected heads of executive agencies and from the President himself have taken the place of legislative law. The executive branch now makes, enforces, and adjudicates its own “law,” none of which has been consented to by the people against whom it is being imposed. Agents of this branch of government also have the power to impose what amount to taxes against us, to which we did not consent. Nor have we had any representation or voice in the creation of these policies. Yet resistance to or failure to comply with these edicts will result in agents of the government depriving you and your family of any combination of life, liberty, or property.
The free-thinking people of this country can see this injustice as plain as day and can see the uncanny parallels between this policy of tyranny imposed upon us now, and the abusive taxes and executive actions taken against the American Colonists by the British Crown. But the longer those who can see these abuses remain silent and inactive, the more solidified the power of tyrants will become. Greater, too, will be the ranks of the sedated masses who don’t see and don’t want to know about the government’s abuses. In between those of us who see and those of us who can never be woken are the half-asleep. If it is possible to awaken them to the exigency of this fight, then we must try. And for those patriots afraid to speak and to act for fear of standing the line by themselves, we must let them know that they are not alone and that we will fight beside them. The future of freedom in the world depends on what we do today; for tomorrow, it might be too late.
© 2021 Tim Lynch, republication without permission prohibited. All rights reserved.
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