Bring The Troops Home Now
By John Longenecker (06/19/06)
It’s time to bring the troops home, and now.
I’d love to see all those tired, overworked, underpaid, underappreciated troops risking their lives come home, spend some time, spend some money and return to civilian life.
It’s time to end the War On Poverty, the War On Drugs and the War On Crime and bring those troops home.
Their mission may not be over – these missions will never be over, it seems – but they are to be recalled and redeployed for the balance of their tours to more useful assignment.
Other troops will come to replace them as they muster out, but not on these missions. It’s time to come home.
These wars on Poverty, Crime and Drugs were defective in their conception and pointless in their inception, except for one purpose: to transfer revenues and personal sovereignty out of your home over to agencies prosecuting those wars. And to the gain of officials and nothing for the country.
As I mention often, the things in this country which are taken from citizens – liberty, personal citizen supremacy relative to officials [the citizen is supreme in America] and other freedoms and authority – morph to become something different to the takers.
A robbery for a victim means loss, fear, indignation - but for the robber, it is revenge against someone else. It may seem like ten dollars taken is ten dollars gained, but anger and revenge which prompt a person to rob are so much more than that.
This is important, because some Americans ask, “Why would someone want to steal our liberty? Where’s the percentage in that?”
The things we hold most precious morph into something else at the moments they are taken from us, too.
For instance, our privacy is precious. Privacy is the safeguard against mistake, abuse and retaliation. Take privacy away – out of an alleged necessity for national security, for instance – and you leave the person and home open to institutional mistake such as mistaken identity, abuses of power with rules subject to interpretation of persons indifferent, and retaliation of drones who might feel miffed at your protest, so they mess with the record, lose something or fail to pass on information.
Privacy, as a safeguard for respite, security and freedom comes to stand in the way of a morbid desire to control, the incentive for nearly all anti-crime policies which haven’t done much in more than thirty years.
You don’t need to be poor, criminal or on drugs to have this ruination and intrusion to your privacy and freedom reach your household; because though you may not be hassled by officials in any instance which might first come to mind in crime, poverty or drugs, you pay the price in terms of your own general household or personal authority more every year as you face agency powers you didn’t grant them – your personal sovereignty versus their moving without regard for your rights (so you have to pay several ways merely to assert yur rights and even then you may not get a favorable ruling) – and your way of life when these changes take hold in general, and you find yourself in increasingly worse situations, thanks to their interference to begin with.
At the very least, it is indifference to our way of life, and that’s a violation of oath of office.
A large part of this – a very large part of this – is the fraud of anti-crime policies which, after decades, go nowhere, accomplish little.
Now I know – I know – that individual officers succeed in their missions, but something’s wrong here; my observation is that in fighting the so-called wars on drugs, poverty and crime, this is not where drugs, poverty and crime are fought. Perhaps those officers may have noticed their futility in everything from technical protections to early release.
It all just spits on their hard work.
Just where these are fought is another piece of Good For The Country.
A thought came to me while I was at Mass yesterday. When it came time to ask the judge of all things in prayer, the congregation asked for Peace. They mentioned political peace, they asked for wisdom for the leaders and a lot of other misguided things.
Misguided..? Yes.
And a thought came to me. (I think a lot in church.)
I often sign my letters.. In liberty. Liberty over Peace, if necessary.
Because Peace isn’t the optimal goal, especially at the prices asked. And Security wouldn’t be the goal, either.
Liberty is the highest goal, because the rest will take care of itself if you give it a chance, including Peace and Security. One of the best kept secrets in the Potomac Fever infected public service.
After seeing what happens when Peace and Security are the goals to the exclusion of liberty, I thought this of other nations and perhaps our own soon:
Nothing puts Peace in its proper perspective better than the loss of personal liberty.
Need I explain that Peace ain’t so hot when you’re relocated against your will. Security ain’t so hot when you’re tracked, suspicioned and supervised. But they both take care of themselves when Liberty prevails.
Bring the troops homes from the War On Poverty, the War On Drugs and The War On Crime.
Because that is not where they are fought.
And because the price – the incremental erosion of our authority, liberty and history, which become something else to those who take them – is far too high.
These are three wars which should be ended.
It would be good for the country.
John Longenecker is author of Transfer Of Wealth and his selected topics are now available on MP3 at www.TransferOfWealth.net
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