America’s Future

Recently, it came to my attention someone close to the Obama Administration is proposing to establish an Internet Czar. The purpose of this czar and his organization would be to essentially bring truth to the Internet, or at least their version of it. As an example, it would ban or block the transmittal such things as unsupported ‘conspiracy theories.’ Ironically, the number one advocate of this, Cass Sunstein, has admitted that some unsubstantiated conspiracy theories have turned out to be true.

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I lived briefly in the Middle East and our email and selection of sites we could visit were either censored or banned. Through Non-Middle Eastern ingenuity, many of us developed a list of code words that we used between our friends in the outside (real) world that usually would get past the government’s filters and censors. This type of approach, by any government, is representative of a government fearing its people, and in the Middle East probably for good reason. Such an approach is similar to the one being proposed here, the only difference; it is by Americans against Americans. Other types of surveillance, such as mobile scanners, similar to those used at airports, are being put into vans and being, or planned to be used, by the Department of Home Land Security, Customs Enforcement Service and state and local law enforcement. These scanners, located in unmarked vans, permit these government agents to do random searches of private vehicles and their occupants without notice—and done without a search warrant.

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All of these actions attack one of the fundamental purposes and underpinnings of our society—the Constitution and its protections. It makes no difference which candidate you support, which political philosophy you believe in, or whether you consider yourself liberal/progressive, right/conservative or a flexible moderate (the so-called 'independent'). When your freedom and the protections of the Constitution are mitigated, the impediments to tyranny are diminished and eventually removed. This evolution from a free society into a tyrannical one is paved with incremental losses of freedoms and diametric growth in governmental power. Unfortunately, many of our freedoms and protections are bartered away by a society trading their freedom for a perceived benefit promised by a government needing ‘only had a little more power.' One such example is the Affordable Health Care Act. What is not mentioned, and most people fail to understand is, more power for the government means less freedom for the people. That correlation, unfortunately, is an inescapable consequence of passing any law, regardless of how benign it may seem, or how much better off we will be with it. Our nation stands precariously on the edge of a precipice, one so narrow that a small nudge could be enough to push us over the edge ending our position as the greatest nation on Earth. The next few years, possibly the next election, will determine if we will have the courage and honor to begin to restore, to the necessary limits, a government that will allow us, the people, to continue as a free people, or falling off that precipice gleefully thinking the government will take care of us and rescue us from ourselves. In the latter case we will become a people enslaved and ruled by a body of government officials and petty bureaucrats that are no longer accountable to the people, but only to themselves and other likeminded people. As I approach the conclusion of my 70th year, I am not optimistic about our nation’s future. I am especially fearful for the children whose opportunities can only diminish under such a government load. When so many people of all political and social philosophies are dependent on the government for some perceived benefit, the possibility there would be any necessary reduction in those benefits becomes inversely increasingly impossible. In short we have adopted a philosophy of political, social and economic cannibalism as our guiding principle. We no longer value personal responsibility and self-reliance, but instead engage the government to take from others what they have earned and redistribute it to us. Unfortunately, this approach leads to a time where, at some point, everyone becomes a meal for others, as the leaders of the French revolution found out. In short, there are no winners with this approach, only losers. At some point we will become just another footnote in the history books, joining the myriad of failed societies of the world that preceded us. In short we will become, except on a larger scale, another Greece. Bill Ryan is a retired businessman living with his wife and daughter in Midlothian, Virginia. He can be contacted at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

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