Independence Day

Hope your July 4th holiday was great, and that you had time to reflect on why it's celebrated. I hope you also had time to think of those who insure it goes on being celebrated and your role in that. It's especially significant to me as we prepare to elect either the dumbest president in my lifetime, or another political hack. I'll leave it up to you to decide which is which.

I re-read "On Liberty", by John Stuart Mill yesterday, and also began thumbing through "Democracy in America", by Alexis de Tocqueville, again. They dovetail nicely with some things I've been considering for a while now, the tyranny of mob rule, the tyranny of the minority, and the effect of amoralism, and ignorance, and in addition the differences between liberty and freedom.

In this post I'd like to go over "On Liberty". Mill recognized that liberty can be seen as either the freedom to act, or freedom from coercion. It is interesting to note that modern libertarianism rejects this completely, as though there is no difference at all between the two. A conservative would say that liberty is more important as the coercion of a heavy-handed government is, in fact, tyranny. A liberal would say that the freedom to act is more important as government coercion is vital to a more equal distribution of wealth among individuals thereby insuring individual freedom.

Mill, as well as John Locke and others, were in the forefront of saying that an individual has a right to do whatever he wants, so long as it does no harm to others. In Mill's case this was later called the Harm Principle. What's made me think about this so much of late is the slow erosion of our personal liberties in this country, most of which is attained from a platform of protecting someone else's freedom. Although it is liberalism, with it's underpinnings of socialism, that is responsible for much of this decay, no one party owns it completely.

I, for one, have no desire to live in a country where I am completely protected and absolved from hurting myself or others, as the liberals would have me do. "Just send us all your fortune, and we will take care of all your needs and wants, so long as you do what we say." Creepy. Nor do I wish to live in a country where corporations and individuals are permitted to extract every natural resource from the land, with no responsibility as fellow citizens of a common nation. As always the best path lies in balance and moderation.

Which brings us to morality and education. When public education was first proposed in the United States, aside from readin', writin' and 'rithmatic, it was recognized that one of its functions ought to be furthering the moral training of individuals, not in terms of religious morality (although if you go back and read opinion pieces of the era you will find The Bible was suggested as the greatest text possible with which to begin), but in terms of general ethics. The second, and in my opinion, more important idea was to teach children civics; how to be a good and responsible citizen.

This proved worthy, and one of the worst things we as citizens have done in my lifetime, is to allow civics to be shoved to the back of the line of things we expect our schools to teach our children. We are working on a second generation now of people who have no idea how our government is supposed to function. I've met many people who swear to me that the words 'separation of church and state' are written in the U.S. constitution. I've had people argue with me that the words "The right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed", don't mean what they say or don't appear in an amendment. Hell, that was the argument of four Supreme Court Justices last week!

We seem to be moving in the direction of pure democracy in this country with the majority (whichever side it may be), saying to the rest, "F@*K YOU! I'm right you're wrong, Die. We will not hold together as we are if this remains the case. It may still be the United States of America, but it will not be the place of liberty and freedom that the founding fathers envisioned. We can, however, steer it back that way by electing people who share that vision and more importantly holding their feet to the fire, and, or throwing them out if they don't. The best think about this place we call home is that every vote still counts, and our elected officials still have to listen to us if we're smart enough and persistent enough to force them to.