Gina Lunori writes

"Revolution Time Again..."

Gina Lunori

"....the cost of avoiding this bloodbath at home includes inflicting a bloodbath on Iraq and funding bloodbaths elsewhere. We're not fooling anyone by puttering around and delaying and attributing our reluctance to pacifism...."

I've heard Republicans talk about getting the government off our backs often
enough now that I think it's sunk in. If I ever see a Republican who actually
means it, I think I may dust off my voting suit and try to find my way to the
polling place.I'd like the government off our backs, and off our toes, and out of our
pocketbooks and the rest of us, too. I'd like the government to keep its
hands to itself and go back to where it belongs, if the more pessimistic
theologians are right after all and there is such a place.

They say we have a government to protect us from criminals, and every year
politicians pass new laws that grease the wheels for bigger and more
outrageous crimes. Could Enron have happened without the help of the
politicians who helped out as surely as if they'd been driving the getaway
car?

They say we have a government to keep the peace, but war-hungry people know
that the best way to feed their bloodlust is by using the government. Case in
point: the present Iraq war, which was not caused by the American people
using their government as designed to protect them from threats, but was the
result of a few individuals using the government as a tool for their own ends.
Who believes that if actually argued on its merits, this war would have met
with the approval of the American people?

Defenders of the government now can't sing its praises with a straigh face,
so they are reduced to sowing fear of what might happen if the government
abandoned its post. Get government off our backs and what's to keep the Ku
Klux Klan from coming back and taking over the South! Get government off our
backs and who will fix our roads? Get government off our backs and who will
clean up the environment?

But the government has never done anything that couldn't be done better if
the government got the hell out of the way and let people do it on their own.
The government didn't free the slaves so much as it finally stopped enforcing
their slavery. It doesn't fix the roads so much as it fixes the bidding on
the contracts to make the roads. It doesn't clean up the environment -- hell,
it's the worst polluter this country's got! All of these things that people
claim couldn't be done without the government around to call the shots would
have been done, probably better and with less waste of time and effort, if
the government hadn't been getting in the way.

The government runs off to Cancun to negotiate a "free trade" agreement
and ends up spending all of its time trying to make excuses for the barriers
to free trade it relies on. Imagine: a bunch of governments meeting
to make rules governing free trade.
That's like a bunch of graffiti artists spraypainting an anti-vandalism
message on an alley wall. That's like a bunch of alcoholics getting together
at happy hour to hold a drinkathon for sobriety. It's nuts, but in Government
Land, up is down, dry is wet, and free trade is a mountain of asterisks
guarded by bureaucrats.

Your legislators all run for office on crime-fighting platforms, but if you
look at the results of their legislation -- which opens the door to new
assaults and thefts with every bill that's passed -- you'd be in your right
mind to want to move the Capitol to Alcatraz. They claim to be working for
national defense, but when you see how vigorously they're arming the world and
angling for war you begin to understand that the biggest threat to the United
States is its own government.

But I'm not asking you to join the Black Bloc or even the Libertarian Party;
I won't wish upon a star for the government to vanish into thin air. But
could we at least have a better government? Not "one day" but tomorrow,
and then the tomorrow after that and so on. Nobody can respect this
government, but most people have some idea of what government they could
respect, and I think if we each one of us pushed in that direction, as
different as our opinions are, the direction would generally be up, and not
just back-and-forth like it is today.

I'm not saying we should have crude majority rule. The majority doesn't
necessarily have any sense just because of its size. I mean: look at any
bestseller list. If the government dreams, I believe it sometimes dreams that
it will one day have the power to force everyone to read Chicken Soup for
the Soul every day. It's like that with the rest of its laws -- let a
majority, or even a sufficiently powerful minority, believe that something is
good for everyone and -- whammo! -- a law is sure to follow making it mandatory.

The worst part is that there are many dopes out there who don't trust their
own opinions enough that this would bother them. "Well, the law says I should
read Chicken Soup for the Soul -- who am I to argue with the
opinions of the majority? I'm only one person, after all." Pity a nation
that has a population whose consciences have atrophied so much that they'd let
a majority make the decisions for them when it really counts. And pity a
society that lived through the 20th Century without putting safeguards in
place to prevent this.

Don't get me wrong -- it only makes sense in an important matter to
consult the people around you, to get a sense for what other people
would do in a similar situation. But if, after getting this feedback, your
conscience still tells you that to do what the majority would have you do
means doing something wrong -- are you going to go ahead and do wrong? Might
as well just click off the ol' brain entirely, then -- you won't be needing it.

It's true that some people are better judges of right and wrong than others,
but I'd bet that if you just set everybody free to do what they felt to be
right the world would be a whole hell of a lot better than if you let some
majority or influential minority of people decide what everybody
ought to be doing. The law never made any right person righter than they
already were, and although it may be true that fear of the law has made some
wrong people think twice, it's also true that the same fear regularly
convinces otherwise sensible people do awful things.

And it takes these otherwise sensible people out-of-service, as people anyway.
They can still push buttons and follow orders, I suppose, but their conscience
is the part of them that's most desperately needed in this world, and we, by
allowing government to prohibit independent conscience, have allowed these
necessary consciences to wither away.

I meet people all the time who have decided that the government is the best
judge of how they should conduct their lives -- I feel like laying a flower on
them and saying something nice to the next-of-kin. I get the feeling that if
the government decided it could get better use out of them by grinding their
bones into glue, they wouldn't get much further back along the path to
humanity than cursing their bad luck on the way to the glue factory.

There are some people who really do serve their country -- as people, complete,
with their bodies and their minds and their consciences. They're
wonderfully dangerous men and women, and the government categorizes
them that way if it recognizes them. After all, a person of conscience only
follows the government's dictates accidentally, when they happen not to
prohibit good or mandate evil, and how often is that, really?

The revolutionaries who ripped this country away from its colonizers felt that
they had to explain themselves. The monarchy they were ridding themselves of
was different from the republic that suffocates us now, but the excuses people
had for putting up with it were pretty much the same. The revolutionaries
responded to these excuses by saying that as far as they could tell, the
reason we put up with governments at all is that we use them to protect our
rights -- for instance to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" - from
those who would try to violate them. Furthermore, "whenever any Form of
Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to
alter or to abolish it."

Ask yourself now: is your government protecting lives, or endangering them?
Does it protect liberty, or threaten it? Does it facilitate the pursuit of
happiness, or frustrate it?

If the government were merely inefficient and clumsy at doing its job I might
grumble a little, but I'd probably let it slide. But when a government, like
ours, has become a threat to life and liberty, I say it's time for a
change. We'd be better off without it. If we need a government at all, the
government we need is a different one -- not just this one with a sprinkling of
new heads above its ties.

If the choice were between a bloody and awful revolution like our Civil War
and keeping the government we have today, it would be argued -- and I might
argue myself -- that the cost is too high, and it's better to suffer under the
government we have than pay such a price in blood for a new one.

But who says this is the choice we have to make? Is there no other choice
than between a bloodbath and an embarrassing and savage parody of democracy?
Are we like Hollywood -- so sapped of creativity that we can't find a path from
where we are now to where we want to go that doesn't involve a thrilling
penultimate act with car chases, shootouts and explosions?

Right now, the cost of avoiding this bloodbath at home includes inflicting a
bloodbath on Iraq and funding bloodbaths elsewhere. We're not fooling anyone
by puttering around and delaying and attributing our reluctance to pacifism.

What's in the way of us taking this country back? It's not 535 members of
congress, or a few thousand rich, politically-connected people in the halls
of power. The problem is the millions of Americans who are waiting, waiting,
waiting, hoping that someone else is going to fix things for them, wishing
that they lived in a make-believe world where they could continue to buy their
toys and pay their taxes and some day a movie star hero will come and rescue
them.

They plead every couple of years for their representatives to make some small
sacrifice for their benefit -- but, though they're disappointed every year,
they remain unwilling to make any sacrifice themselves to make a real change.

There are millions of people in this country who are of the opinion
that the war in Iraq was a terrible adventure, dishonestly engaged in, and
with terrible consequences -- but these same millions of people do absolutely
nothing effective to change their country's actions. They mumble complaints,
or forward emails, or put bumper stickers on their cars, and passionately wish
that somebody else were doing something effective, and then they go back to
work the next morning to wish again over coffee the way you might pray that
your favorite team wins the Super Bowl.

Myself, I'm sick of arguing with the government. I don't have any more
argument with the government -- I know what kind of beast it is, I know what
kind of man I am: We've come to a sort of an impasse. I've got a new bone
to pick -- it's with people who know perfectly well that things have gone to
hell in this country but who aren't lifting a finger to do anything about it
(or who flatter themselves into thinking that "voting" is the same as doing
something about it).

Voting is kind of like gambling on sports, but slightly more sacred (maybe
you remember the outrage when John Poindexter's crew at DARPA started a
program to encourage gambling on world events as a way of enhancing
intelligence estimates). You've got to play to win, and playing with only a
vote is hardly playing at all. The people who place big bets, in large
denominations, are the ones who get the big pay-outs. The rest of us are just
paying the house.

When I was a kid, even before I could vote, I'd look over the voter's pamphlet
and weigh the arguments carefully and imagine that I was making grave
decisions of right and wrong. Only later did I realize that voting
for the right thing isn't the same as doing the right thing. It's
only sort of a feeble "I wish" followed by an agreement to leave it up to the
majority, or to the skillful manipulation of that majority, or to some other
mechanism that bears no resemblance at all to an assertion of conscience on my
part.

There's an election coming up, and there are a bunch of candidates holding
debates and raising money, and a lot of people who really ought to know better
holding their breath and anticipating how they're going to whisper their "I
wish." I consider it a lucky day when I meet someone who cares as much as I
do for the soul of my country and yet cares as little for who wins the
Democratic presidential nomination as for who won the World Championships of
Parcheesi.

But most people I meet who pretend to be anguished about the state of their
country have got it backward -- it's their country that should be crying over
them. While I want to put a flower on the corpses of these prematurely dead
citizens, the country wants to build a monument over the mass of them and
inscribe on it: "remember these dead and never let this happen again."

You may have something you'd rather be doing with your time than going up
against the government. That's fine. It's not for everybody. But the least
you can do is to stop supporting the government. If you're going to
decide that you've got other things to be bothered with, at least get out of
our way. Don't think that you can pay your taxes every month and then hide
the pay stub behind your back and declare yourself neutral.

I heard someone praise a conscientious objector who refused to fight in Iraq,
and I asked him if he was still paying taxes. He told me that the government
hadn't created a "conscientious objector" category for taxpayers, so he was
sorry to say he wasn't able to stop paying. As if you only have a conscience
when the government issues you a permit for one!

I told him I know people who've stopped paying their taxes without waiting for
permission, just by lowering their income and living below the tax threshold.
He told me that he wasn't prepared to make that kind of sacrifice. If I had a
pocket calculator I could have told you the maximum price of his conscience.
If I had a quality postal scale I probably still couldn't discern its weight.

Like Walter Mitty these armchair peaceniks burn their draft cards in their
daydreams, meanwhile the people who serve in the military in their place are
equipped, and shipped, and paid for by Walter Mitty's tax dollar.

The biggest obstacles to change aren't the few who are abusing the government,
but the many who are submitting to it and facilitating the abuse.

A government that loved liberty would be trying at every opportunity to expand
and protect that liberty. Our government tries everything it can to evade the
few protections that have survived since its founding. Look at how
shamelessly it has whisked people off to Cuba -- Cuba! -- in order to sweep
them out from under the protection of the Constitution.

A person who loves liberty would not shovel coal into a tyrant's
engine just to earn a higher salary. Why does a person in the United States
who claims to love freedom, and who is intelligent enough to understand that
the government is freedom's enemy, still feel that it's worthy of respect to
be a taxpayer, and the more salary -- and therefore the more taxes -- the more
respect?

If you love liberty, if you hate war, you should at once withdraw your support
from the government. Withdrawing your moral support isn't enough -- it's your
practical support that the government feeds on -- it doesn't give a damn what
your opinions are.

This is something you must do because you know the difference between right
and wrong and you know, when you look the facts straight in the face, that
when you willingly give practical support to the government you participate in
its wrongs. But this is more than a matter of personal integrity.

Imagine the power of this statement. What if every person who felt that the
government had lost their moral support also withdrew their practical
support? What if only one in ten did? It would be the beginning of the end.
It would be that nonviolent revolution we're praying for.

How is that going to happen? Better you should ask yourself: How is
that going to happen if even I do not help make it happen? Cast your vote --
don't just punch out the chad but vote your whole person: body, mind and
conscience.

Put a price on your conscience and determine for yourself if the cost of
continuing to give practical support to the government is higher than the cost
of withdrawing that support.

There's a myth that "death and taxes" are inevitable. Taxes, at least, are
avoidable -- although to those with cheap consciences, only at comparatively
expensive rates. I know people who are living what in most parts of the world
would be considered wealthy lives, without doing anything to put them in fear
of IRS auditors, and who are still living tax-free. And their consciences,
which to them are quite valuable commodities, remain intact and unmortgaged.

It's easy to come up with excuses for not acting. And it's easy not to
recognize them for excuses. For instance: "Isn't the U.S. government much
better than, say, China's or Saudi Arabia's, or so many others?" But that
only works if you think the course of nations is the sort of course that
should be graded on the curve.

What a sad concession it would be to believe that our republic, the first one
out of the gates after the age of monarchies, was the finish line for this
country and the best sort of government anyone could aspire toward. A bunch
of powdered-wigged slaveholders somehow miraculously scribbling out the best
scheme for protecting life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness anyone could
hope for.

Imagine instead that maybe we've learned something in the last two and some
centuries -- that we can do much better than we're doing now, because what
we're doing now stinks. But don't imagine for a minute that it's going to
change on its own, or that you can continue to prop it up without sharing
responsibility for what it's doing.