QotD
The occasional crook will band together with his kind and take your government away from you if you let him. It is very soothing to the conscience to tell yourself that, after all, you can’t do anything to change the sorry state of things. It is much easier to sit in your living room, skim the headlines, and then make bitter remarks about those no-good crooks in [government], and to complain about how they pay no attention to the welfare of the ordinary citizen (meaning yourself) …
Why should the average citizen bother with politics? Why touch the dirty business? Isn’t politics loaded up with crooks you wouldn’t want to eat with and crackpots you wouldn’t want to have in your house?
Then why bother? Why expose yourself to bad companions and snide remarks simply to make a single-handed attempt to clean the Augean stables, to bail the ocean, to clear the forest?
Because you are needed. Because the task is not hopeless.
Democracy is normally in perpetual crisis. It requires the same constant, alert attention to keep it from going to pot that an automobile does when driven through downtown traffic. If you do not yourself pay attention to the driving, year in and year out, the crooks, or scoundrels, or nincompoops will take over the wheel and drive it in a direction you don’t fancy, or wreck it completely.
When you pick yourself up out of the wreckage, you and your wife and your kids, don’t talk about what “they” did to you. You did it, compatriot, because you preferred to sit in the back seat and snooze. Because you thought your taxes bought you a bus ticket and a guaranteed safe arrival, when all your taxes bought you was a part ownership in a joint enterprise, on a share-the-cost and share-the-driving plan.
I let Robert Heinlein do the writing on this post.
On 18-Nov-05 at 11:25 am,
Forge wrote:
Or you can do what I did -secede and establish your own sovereign state! You too can breathe the sweet air of freedom again! Feel the wind in your hair, &c.
Seriously. Crypto-microstates are all the rage.
On 18-Nov-05 at 12:33 pm,
drac wrote:
I think I already have seceded, in all honesty.
This was more commentary on the wailing, gnashing of teeth and beating of breasts that inevitably had to follow the buildup of the last few weeks. In certain quarters, that is.
Err. why is it called a crypto-microstate ? Crypto means something rather different to me..
On 19-Nov-05 at 1:58 am,
Sin wrote:
I plan to be a benevolent dictator of the island nation of H’meau myself.
On 19-Nov-05 at 10:14 pm,
Forge wrote:
Crypto- as in hidden, or secret. It wouldn’t do to advertise the fact that you’re an independent microstate, now would it? For one thing, having a population of one means you have no standing army. Especially if you’re sitting down.
On 20-Nov-05 at 2:04 am,
drac wrote:
Aaah. Of course… crypto == hidden.
Well, you could always be like Shawn Ogg, I suppose. Standing army, civil service, palace domestic and odd job man, all rolled into one.
Micronation is synonymous with Sealand for me. Why be a micronation of one when you can take an entire family along and issue passports too ?
All this is sounding vaguely like something Calvin would do… preferably with a fortress of snow. I think I like Sin’s plan better.
On 22-Nov-05 at 7:15 am,
Kermit wrote:
forget microstates. join the Illuminati