Brian Gallimore's Blog

from Adrian Murry’s facebook post

One thing I have learned over the last five years of politically righteous indignation is that if we protest from a position of victimhood we too easily enable ourselves to be victims. My outrage since The Great Mistake of 2008 has been the government’s increasing ability to victimize its people, to turn citizens into subject and subjects into serfs. It dawned on me all too slowly that there is little point and no avail protesting to the government about this on the grounds of the virtues of liberty, just as there is little to be gain from petitioning the rapist for passion and decency. Both will merely turn a deaf ear.

… With some inspiring exceptions, politicians have primarily excelled at being self-serving hucksters, going back to the Roman Senate. Indeed, who could not envision the backroom dealing, ruthless ambition and deliberate betrayals of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar playing out in today’s United States Congress?

Such was true in America a century and a half ago, when the open and honest corruption and bribery of the day paled in comparison to the sophistry of the sleaze creatively not on display in government today. One need only consider that when you have Wall Street bankers regulating the banking industry, executives from agribusiness running the Food and Drug Administration, union flacks heading the Department of Education, military contractors in charge of the Pentagon and, of all people, insurance and pharmaceutical companies controlling our healthcare system, you can pretty much take it as a given that the country has been lost. Stick a fork in it. The United States of America is done.

But that does not mean we need to give in. We just need to understand that the dark side is playing a different game than we are. They’ve moved on to a higher form of chess while we’re all arguing about the proper rules for Go Fish. They are not listening to what you’re saying because they don’t care what you want, except to the extent that you might possibly though not probably impede their ability at being reelected to the House of Calliopes and Cascading Cash. The best way to ensure that is to divide you up into so many interests and factions and spheres that you will never be able to mount an effective opposition. We’re all too busy fighting among ourselves to fight them.
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To live lives of free and independent people, beholden and bound only to our God, we must first free ourselves from the notion that we must be dependent on government to grant us our freedom. Government has no such power and, if it did, is unlikely to exercise it. By believing we must petition government for freedom, we are conceding that we are either prisoners or slaves.