Thursday, May 19, 2011

And Do What?

I just looked in on the Lew Rockwell site, and I saw a piece there by John Whitehead. For the most part, it's kind of the same-old-same-old: the PATRIOT Act is going to get itself renewed, and augmented, yet again; it's the end of the Constitution, and so on. All true, just not new. Mr. Whitehead, after opening with a Thomas Paine quote ("It is the responsibility of the patriot to protect his country from its government"), closes his essay in the way that most such essays close, with a nonspecific call to action:
Patriots, wake up! It’s time to protect our country and our rights against a government of wolves that grows more power-hungry with every passing day.
Well, OK, I thought, but what does an "awake" patriot look like in these days? What does a patriot do, after having awakened?

Does he try to build a revolution, and overthrow our criminal supervisors? A one-person revolution is simply suicide on very unfavorable terms, even assuming that the lone revolutionary manages to get noticed by his rulers. Join a militia? Trouble is, one could be reasonably assured that half of those involved would be paid agents provocateur or some other form of police spy, and the other half would be people who are convinced that we're not killing Mooslims, or Metsicans, or both, fast enough or in great enough numbers; or who have unreasonable problems with black folks or Jewish folks or Catholic folks or whomever. In other words, people whose company I don't care to keep.

Does he get out and vote? Been there, done that ... no change.

Does he ... write a blog? Yeah, sure. Am there, doing that. A certain amount of fun, but no change.

Really, Mr. Whitehead, I am awake ... I think. Just clueless about what to do about it.

3 comments:

Phil Marx said...

Remember, Morpheus wasn't "The One." But he did help Neo to wake up.

Perhaps your duty is nothing more than to awaken others!

Mimi said...

It's the old question and I have yet to find anybody who can answer it concretely. There seems to be hardly a soul who is happy with the state of the country and the world, but the malcontents (that's me, folks) either blame it on opposing factors (lib vs. neo and so on) or are just too lazy and/or discouraged to do anything about it. And besides, what would that "anything" be?

Jonathan Versen said...

Well, we could dress up as Native Americans and dump all our crappy consumer electronics in the Boston Harbor in the middle of the night, and not pay the subsequent fine, and go to jail. That'll show 'em.