What We Learned At the Debates

I’m not a fan of Presidential politics, so I pretty much ignore the so-called debates for both parties. Last weekend they had a debate on Saturday night.  We were out of town and stayed at a hotel that had very limited channel choices.  When that happens, I end up roaming up and down the channels to try and find anything that might be interesting.  I stumbled across the debates.

The moderator quoted former defense secretary Gates, who said that the presidential candidates all were ignoring the threats to our national security and needed to come up with defense strategies for the various countries, regimes and forces that were real and potential threats to the US.

The moderator then went down the row of candidates and asked them to address Gates’ comments. Each of them proceeded to talk about how they would employ our military in a myriad of different ways.

Now, I really don’t like any of the GOP candidates, but with that said, I was incredibly disappointed that none of them addressed the notion that the defense department is not and shouldn’t be the first choice for foreign affairs activities. Once you decide that you need the defense department, all other options are done.  Diplomacy is best done with the threat of military action.  You can’t use military action as a threat to use diplomacy.

I realized as I was watching this, that we in the liberty movement are kind of the same. We see armed resistance as the ONLY method to achieve our goals.

Some of the reasoning for this is because of our own history.

Many of us are veterans and like most folks, we’re comfortable with what we know.

Many of us came to the movement because of the very real threats to the 2^nd Amendment.

Guns are the common denominator for most of us.

The problem is that just like in foreign affairs, once you make the decision to solve your issues with force, it’s hard to de-escalate.

It becomes complete victory or total loss.

How do we accomplish change?

Change on the level of an entire country like ours requires some sort of rebellion; members of our society against its leaders.

Rebellion runs the gamut of something like the Tea Party movement or the 1% movement, all the way up to subversion and armed conflict.

For example, the rebellion may intend to extract limited political concessions unattainable through less violent means.

On the other extreme, the rebellion may intend to break away a portion of the nation from government control and establish an autonomous state within traditional ethnic or religious territorial bounds.

None of these has any guaranty of success.

Rebellions arise when the government is unable or unwilling to redress the demands of important social groups. Our government is very good at keeping social groups separate.  These groups are “pigeon-holed” into their particular needs, descriptions, beliefs, etc.  There is a reason why the media talks about black lives matter, white racists, gun owning subversives, left wingers, right wingers, evangelicals, atheists, etc.  It’s to cause us to focus on each other instead of the evil pervasiveness of our government.

Liberty is more than just the 2^nd Amendment.  While we concentrate on the 2^nd, our enemies are totally destroying the 1^st through 9^th Amendments.  The 10^th has been ignored for well over a century.

In part 2, we’ll discuss how we can try to accomplish change, short of the bullet box.