Celebrating the Freedoms We Don’t Have
This weekend we celebrate the changing of our guard.
Which, when you stop to think about it, is more than a little odd. Do the inmates of Rikers Island throw a party when they get a new warden? To celebrate the changing of the color of the uniforms worn by their cagers?
And yet, we do.
This coming weekend, Americans will celebrate not being free to – among other things:
Buy and display fireworks themselves.
Choose whether to wear a seat belt.
Say “no thanks” to the health insurance mafia.
Travel without permission (and decline to produce your “papers” on demand).
Smoke in a privately owned bar or pool hall.
Freely associate – or not.
Ever truly own a home or land outright, free from yearly rent payments (in the form of real estate taxes) to the government.
Educate your children as you (rather than strangers in a distant capital city) see fit.
Consume substances decreed (arbitrarily) to be “illegal.”
Possess “contraband” items (including firearms, without which the right to self-defense is a nullity).
Open a business without permission.
Contract your labor without permission – and under “terms and conditions” decreed by the government.
Elect not to provide the government with evidence (the income tax form) that can and will be used against you, despite the Fifth Amendment.
Produce and sell milk and other farm products that haven’t been “inspected” by the government and without the permission of the government.
Defend oneself against even the most egregious violation of the law by the law’s enforcers.
Rent a room or apartment you own to whom you wish.
Fish (or hunt) without a license… even on your own land.
Use your car to provide taxi service.
Collect rainwater for personal use.
Opt not to have your home connected to “grid” electricity.
Have your young daughters set up a curbside lemonade stand on a hot July afternoon.
The “long train of abuses” (as Jefferson described them 239 years ago this Saturday) is extensive. Far more so today than it was back then. And yet, we – most Americans – continue to play their part in the annual July Fourth kabuki theater. We pretend we’re “free” – and the government pretends it has the “consent of the governed.”
Few stop to ask themselves: If the Fourth Amendment guarantees that we are to be “free from unreasonable searches and seizures” how it can be that all of us are legally subject to completely random searches – without even a whiff of individualized suspicion – whenever we go for a drive in our cars or travel by airplane?
If the Bill if Rights – which is legally part of the Constitution – is (as we are told) the law of the land, how is it that other laws – “interpretations” issued by judges at odds with the crystal clear language of the Constitution – have come to supersede it?
How does one “consent” without actually having given consent? How does the fact that a question was put to a vote – and some people voted in favor – come to mean that you have given your consent to the measure?
Try quoting the Constitution – the Bill of Rights – in court.
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