Individual Liberty — Individual Responsibility 

My road trip begins this weekend

Do you think about what you read? Do you think about the positions you take and consider them carefully with regard to basic principles? Or do you listen to what others have to say and parrot that? Do you get your opinions from the radio? Are your ideals driven by emotion or rational thought? Is your political ideology akin to a religion or to a religious institution?

I sometimes wonder about these things when I interact with other people. Maybe I’m taking it all too seriously but of late I’ve become disillusioned with many “conservatives”. Of course I’ve been disillusioned with “liberals” for a long time. But too often lately it’s more of a general dissatisfaction with what passes for reasoned opinion. I guess I’m falling out of step.

Maybe it’s a failing of mine, but I just can’t seem to say what I want to say in under a thousand words or so, and often closer to two or three thousand. There seem to be only one or two people that read this blog regularly that actually are willing to read a post that long and think about it before commenting. To those people; I truly value your opinions. I learn something from you and your blogs as well.

There are only about five or six other people that even bother commenting, but I’m not really certain in some cases that those people are really even reading what I have to say. It seems that the comments they leave are little more than an acknowledgement that I’ve posted something and commented on what they’ve said on their blog. It’s sort of like a mutual link exchange thing.

Maybe it’s just the “twitterization” of the blogosphere. Or maybe I’ve lost sight along the way about the purpose of blogs. If all we’re here to do is comment on the news of the day and express our outrage can’t we just do that in letters to the editor? Very few bloggers actually break real new stories. We simply aren’t in enough places to be able to do that. But we’ve all got our opinions – and more often than not they’re driven by an emotional reaction to what someone else has reported on.

That bothers me. In an age when people seem to get their news from second rate comedians or activists pretending to be journalists I’m not sure that opinions based on partial reports are all that useful. We debate the grand issues like how much government run health care will cost instead of whether we even have a legitimate “right” to it. We worry about how much we’ll have to raise taxes to pay for a grand political scheme instead of whether the government should be involved in it in the first place.

We purport to support the Constitution and so very few of us seem to have actually read it. We claim we believe in the principles of our founders and yet demonstrate that they’re only important to us when they support our point of view on the latest political issue of the day. We become outraged when a politician from “the opposition” does or says something stupid, and we ignore or praise the politician on “our side” that does the same. When our “opponents” do this we call it hypocrisy. When we do it we turn a blind eye to it or call the person that shows it to us a fool.

Here’s a case in point. We conservatives claim that we abhor “activist” judges. The idea that the federal government can tell the states that laws prohibiting abortions are unconstitutional bothers us. Yet at the same time so many “conservatives” believe that it’s perfectly fine for the courts to uphold federal anti-drug legislation. Both are examples of the federal government overreaching and usurping powers that rightfully belong to the states. Both are examples of the courts asserting powers to the federal government that it does not rightfully have. Both should be equally abhorrent to conservatives and yet to many conservatives they are not.

Either we believe in the principles passed to us by our founders and in the plain meaning of the Constitution and its amendments or we don’t. If we believe in the words of the Declaration of Independence then we have to believe that our rights are given to us by God and that those rights convey a duty in addition to the privileges they grant to us. If we believe that God gave us our rights and that all men are created equal then we cannot honestly hold the idea that some men have the rights we are blessed with and others do not based upon where they hold their citizenship. Yet it is precisely this attitude that I’ve recently encountered from “conservative” voices.

It’s almost enough to drive me to despair. How can we hope to preserve liberty if we don’t understand its source and deny the principle that all men are granted it. The thing about our unalienable rights is that they convey with them a responsibility to our fellow men;  creatures made by the same God that made us and created equal with us before the eyes of God. We must exercise the rights given to us by God with responsibility and we have the right to expect that others exercise their God given rights with responsibility as well.

Failure to exercise these rights with responsibility will inevitably lead to judgment. The man that denies these rights to others may well have them justly denied to him in consequence. This is after all what laws and governments were created for;  to ensure that society and every man respects the God given rights of every other man. This is what we fight “just” wars over as well; to prevent those who would trample upon the rights of men from doing so.

We cannot pick and choose when we will demonstrate faith in our principles and when we will abrogate those principles to satisfy our visceral emotional responses. There are some on the “right” that are crying wolf today over the impending doom of our civilization and the coming revolution where we will institute a new government upon new principles. There are some on the “left” that are saying that we need to scrap what we have been given by our founders for a “new world order”.

I’m not in either of these camps. I believe that what our founders gave to us is robust – and that despite the corruption of mankind it can still be redeemed. But to redeem it we must look to its principles and to the consequences of holding to those principles – even if it might be uncomfortable.

I can’t believe how much work it looks like it’s going to take. Either I’m wrong about holding to the principles upon which our nation was based or many more people than I thought need to relearn what those principles are and to take a stand upon them;  one that isn’t based upon mere ideological conformity.

I'm probably going to go quiet here for a while. I need to pack my things. I'm moving to Salt Lake City right after thanksgiving. Our economy and I haven't gotten on too well, and it's time I did something about it for my family - so I've taken a contract with Goldman Sachs. I'll be gone from home for a year.

I’m expecting to leave here either Friday or Saturday depending on how long it takes me to get packed and get my car ready for the trip. I plan on taking two days to drive down so I’ll be offline for at least that long once I get on the road. I don’t know for certain what sort of Internet connectivity I’ll have for a while after I get there either but I’ll try to at least look in on the news and to post something fairly regularly.

Mostly though I think I’ll be observing what’s going on in the blogosphere. Maybe I’ll find that my assessment of things is wrong. I certainly hope so.