Nathan Sharanksy once told his guards in the Gulag, “I am the only free man in this camp.”
As promised, from this day I will no longer share the company of any more wailing and gnashing of teeth. Instead, I will turn my attention toward people who wish to joust at more than just windmills. Our mourning period is over. Sixty days of suffering is enough. It’s time to rip off the black armbands and veils and put on the bright scarlet and green of wrecking.
What follows is how I intend to go about this. I recommend it to you as well. These are my suggestions of a way forward that can provide everyone a sense of peace in the knowledge that we are personally striking back at the Enemy, striking a blow for freedom, but one which does not require sending money to non-profits, marching on Washington or any of those other things we participated in 2010-2012 that made us think we were putting the Enemy to rout.
This is a new (old) view of activism that is sure to work, if tried, for it puts our activism withing neck-wringing reach of our politicians. This is key.
My view is that if we are to win, we must advance to the rear, thus plowing the row, so to speak, for those who follow…and for those who will then lead.
Reorientation
The first thing we all need to do is reorient ourselves away from the flag pole. Think 1850. 1890. Or even 1959. Free men do not naturally attach their lives to the national flag pole; emotionally, spiritually, or culturally. We’ve been slowly eased there for 80 years, by drips and drabs. It’s time to walk away.
Until FDR, outside of the occasional war (1812, 1848, 1918) or run on the banks, all of America’s political world was centered down at city hall, the county building, and the state capital. Not in Washington City. Even the Civil War, America’s greatest trauma until Pearl Harbor, was a series of news events involving soldiers and units locally formed, from Wisconsin to Alabama. All they did was fight, leaving it up to the historians to plot out retroactively which battles mattered most. For the citizens of Indianapolis, the tiny Battle of Perryville, in Kentucky, which took 65% of the 22nd Indiana Volunteers they raised, was a more important battle than Gettysburg.
It’s in the nature of all governments to try and draw all its people under that national flagpole. That’s a law. Most of Europe has never known life any other way. Nor Russia, either. This is one of the inherent evils of government, and one the Constitution was designed specifically to prevent. But as Rahm Emanual might say, FDR was handed a crisis and an opportunity he couldn’t let go to waste. In truth, any government, not just a left-leaning one, would be quick to grab such an opportunity to grow itself. A Republican administration might have done it differently, but it likely would have created something just as gargantuan and ponderous, and totally impossible to unravel as FDR’s government. Their vestiges is with us still, thousands upon thousands of government employees milling around somewhere in Washington, their original purpose long since vanished, and whose only true mission is the perpetuation of their departments and their jobs, all of which involves their insinuating themselves into your lives, your homes, and your wallets.
Once Washington got that first really big taste of Big Government in the 1930’s, it instantly knew it liked it. It was Baby Bear Soup. And government has been moving full bore ever since to increase the ways in which all Americans will someday live under that one single flagpole. You can’t go outside to pick up the morning paper anymore, that there aren’t at least twenty federal agencies trying to reel you in.
But take heart, they haven’t kicked your door in…yet. Why? Well, it’s a matter of courage, the sort politicians and bureaucrats have a hard time summoning up. First, there’s that 2nd Amendment thing, but also the general fear politicians have for kicking in the front door of its constituents. Government prefers to sneak, to come as thieves in the night, saving the storm-trooping as a last straw. So, we’re not there yet.
This is government’s natural bent, by the way. And the media was always there helping out. From the Great Depression on all our media communications changed. Newspapers reformatted print news so as to make sure the headline of the day a flagpole story, which stood out at least 2 inches high, so that even the most disinterested of citizens would have to make a quick mental note before turning to the City Section or Sports Page. When something like Pearl Harbor came along, they had to cover the entire front page with the headline just so readers would know it was something really important.
Headline inflation.
From the beginning the national media was in the business of spewing out false indicators of just what is, and is not, really important. Radio, then television, also began to impress their way into our lives with a new flag-pole centered view of American life. In my day, it was the civil rights movement; where half the nation couldn’t wait for Washington to come in and fix those red-necked pecker-woods’ wagon in Alabama and Mississippi. Television crime drama of the era was centered around incorruptible Washington good guys (the FBI) swooping in to put away bad guys; first racists, then thugs, then polluters, and today, any capitalist.
In short, we’ve been sucked in to view the world the same way a leftish media sees it, and in a way no self-respecting free man from 1850 ever would. The first step of the Compleat Refusenik is to turn his back on the federal government and anything associated with it. I haven’t watched Fox News, or any other news show, since the night of November 6th. I still get news. I still know what’s going and what’s not going on. But I don’t dwell on it if it’s Washington-based, for I won’t subsidize the underlying notion that exists at Fox every bit as much as it does at NBC, CNN, ABC, CBS…that they can both be underneath the flag pole and give us the most fair and balanced news available. Booshway.
Suddenly I see that freedom, such as the sort our forefathers understood instinctively, begins at my front doorstep and works its way downtown, then to the state capital where it abruptly stops…except in those very narrow and specific areas laid out in the Constitution, such as defending the shores, delivering the mail and the Roberts Rules of Order stuff.
In other words, I’m going to go back to reading the Constitution as a free farmer or small businessman might read it, and not as Laurence Tribe does. To restate that great conservative, Robert F Kennedy, I’m not interested in what is, I’m interested in what can be.
This is not to say that, unlike some Tennessee farmers in 1836 who just up and rode off, across three states, to Texas, stopping here and there to shoot pheasant and deer, then build a fire to cook them without a fire permit, to both conceal and carry weapons to their hearts’ content, never stopping at any state line to register their long rifles…
….This is not to say that the modern government does not have ways to insinuate itself into our houses that those Tennesseans did not have to suffer. But still, there are many things it still cannot do, and all we have to do is stand at the front door with a broom, willing and ready to sweep it out should it ever try. 
We would do well to remember The Law of Wrecking, which I’ve recited over and over again for 20 years at least. It is the one freedom that applies to all people, no matter heavy the totalitarian’s boot upon their necks:
Even if people cannot realize their own dream of freedom, they still have the absolute power to deny their tormenters theirs.
This law is universal, one freedom that can never be taken away. It defines, in one way or the other why every dictatorship, whether king, tyrant or committee, ultimately fails. So look to Austin, Springfield, Richmond, Concord, yea, even Sacramento (albeit by a more tortured route) and you will find the relief you seek. The citizens of 1850 wanted representatives in city hall or the state legislature to be within strangling distance.
“Displace Evil with Good.”
I’d like to take credit for this phrase, but it belongs to Dave Ramsey, the personal finance wizard. I’ve often said the day Dave Ramsey replaces Glenn Beck in the three-hour time slot before Limbaugh is the day America will have gotten its priorities straightened out. It will be the day all the Bigs; Government, Business, Banks, Labor, even Big Contraceptive, will have to begin to feel the heat of irrelevance.
Imagine a glass filled with Coca Cola. Then imagine pouring a glass full of water over top of it. (For those of you at the RNC, do this in a sink and not on the dining room table.) What you will see is the dark liquid turn lighter and lighter until eventually it will be as clear…as water. This is displacement, and in a world where Evil can never be finally defeated, (just as Good cannot) it can still be completely displaced.
Everyone should reorient his/her life to displacing Evil in whatever venue you can find, beginning on your own doorstep, working your way down the street to the school, city hall, the county building, etc. Become a squeaky wheel of Good. Become a nuisance, displacing Leftism as you go.
In doing so you will isolate government, which, trust me, it won’t like one bit. It will not sit idly by. It will react and reach out, then overreach. This too is a law.
It is only when government comes upon your door stoop and wants to come in that you must make certain decisions. We are not there yet. Those decisions you make will be made based on the protection and needs of your House. We all have different levels of risk we can assume in confronting government, and I won’t suggest anyone play the game for more than they can afford to lose. But saying “No” as often as possible, or refusing to even acknowledge it is there, will have a collective effect on government.
Mark Your Territory, Make them afraid
And by marking your territory thus, you will make them afraid.
The good news is that this has been a work in progress for three-four years now, and FreedomWorks is one of those groups that helps in organizing this effort. You won’t be alone. The process has already begun. Just keep it local. I know it isn’t as sexy as burning John Boehner in effigy, but it’s ten times more effective.
The fate of the country rests on the tiniest of hard-to-see virtues in our leaders, virtues that many, believe it or not, posses by the bushel-load, only are not in a position to let them come to the forefront. As we displace Evil from under their feet, those virtues will become more and more apparent.
This too is a law.
Resistance as natural process
When the time is ripe (think 1770, not 1776) when the first thoughts of tea parties and lighting little fires were first getting into people’s heads, then you will see things begin to snowball.
If there’s a George Washington out there, we haven’t seen him yet, much less the army he will have to raise. And then there’s the problem with finding people who will follow, since we’re almost all self-declared generals. And since many as a half-million of them have sent their names to the White House saying they want to secede, you can see how bright those generals are.
About secession, this needs to be said. Back somewhere else it was said that the issue of secession was settled in the famous case of Lincoln v Davis in 1865. While clever-sounding (I’m sure he didn’t come up with it by himself) it was also one of the wrongheadedest comments I’ve ever seen written by one who purports to be smart. The power to dissolve the union is both eternal and re-assessed daily, and that right and those powers were first laid out in the Declaration when the Thirteen Colonies decided to dissolve their relationship with Great White King Over Big Water (“Many moon come Choctaw”). Of course we can. But by “we” I mean our appointed representatives from the several states, who can lay down a bill of particulars and present it to the new kings in the Beltway and then let nature take it’s course. Secession doesn’t begin by the seat of our britches.
But we’re a way away from that point, just as the Colonies were in 1770. We still have a few more tea party raids to go through, and all sorts of usurpations (look for them from Obamacare and EPA soon) before we start lighting fires. Then, almost as if on cue, our state leaders will begin talking among themselves, only secession still will not top their agenda. But resistance will, which I am urging now.
So you see, there is a natural process here, and I think it carries much greater weight if the threat of the natural right to secede is forever wafting through the air.
In the meantime, our targets for displacement should be Corporatism and the public highway (the pop culture). And of course, the schools. I repeat, get involved and take over those schools. Check out Agenda 21 activities going on and meet people. You don’t have to run for school board, but if you write here, sometimes the well-written flier or 2 page-pamphlet works wonders where you live. Just join in.
The election proved to us that what ails Big Business is the same thing that ails Big Government and Big Labor; an amoral belief in greater wealth and greater power through politics than through merit. I believe the Compleat Refusenik should say “No” as often as possibly. Support local small business. Let them watch their bottom lines shrink just as FoxNews is watching its ratings tank.
But speaking of sluts, it would be nice to keep morality issues (more precisely, immorality issues) in your gun sights as well. Find local venues. Create them. There isn’t just indecency to to be displaced here, but millions of lives, and not just the unborn. The point is: Within the Left’s free-contraception political harem there are millions of young women with second thoughts. With Christian charity and understanding, not self-righteousness, keep their guilt out in front of them. for most of them feel guilt and fear punishment. Lead them away. Ever so gently.
So as Democrats vote, Refuse early and Wreck often.
Keep the faith, and point your noses into the wind.
There’s a wahr on.
Bonne Annee
