Day by Day

The Freedom to Live

I merely wish to be allowed to live my life, yet I am confronted every day by the unrelenting forces of the powers that be, pressing from every side, forming the vast diversity of humanity into the perfectly uniform cube of the ideal citizen: pliant, productive, and powerless.

My desires are few and have been enumerated many times before: I wish to have the right to think and converse as I will, with whom I will, as I will; I wish to have the right to live my life free of undue external influence; I wish to have the right to mainrain my rights. These wishes, reasonable and understandable, desirable and honorable, proclaimed and professed, have proven themselves too much to bear for a powerfully-minded few and a weakly-willed many.

I do not proclaim the way of the anarchist. Chaos is both unnatural and untennable. I do not proclaim the way of the socialist, facist, or communist. Power will always draw more to itself; deliberately concentrating it is welcoming your bondage with open arms. I do not profess democracy. Governance by the lowest common denomenator is every bit as foolish as it sounds.

Instead, I propose the notion of liberty. I propose a society built not on freedoms, as they are given and likewise taken away, but on freedom itself, on the understanding that there is nothing a law can do to a man but enslave him; there is nothing one individual can do to another but bind him; there is nothing a governance can do but restrict its citizenry. I propose a system where there are no freedoms to grant, because all freedom is granted. I propose a place where law is constructed literally by the people, few, many, or all, and applied likewise as they choose to suubmit to their own governance. I propose a nation not where
Power is forbade, but where no man or men by their own decree may cast their will upon others.

I am not a revolutionary or an agitator, a hippie or a Nazi, a theologian or a scholar. I am not a man of extremes. I believe I am a reasonable man realizing an increasingly unreasonable situation, and I wish to find a solution.