Posted on 06/21/2007 10:36:55 AM PDT by tpaine
When You Wish Upon a Star ...
by L. Neil Smith
Was it Frederick Pohl or Alexei Panshin who first observed, "The future isn't what it used to be"? Maybe it was Karl Marx. Maybe it was Groucho Marx.
Whoever said it, that's more or less what science fiction seems to be telling us right now. If you stood in front of your bathroom mirror every morning and repeated a hundred times, "I'm a stupid, worthless pile of excrement and I'm not fit to live," how long would it be -- days, weeks, months -- before you started to believe it? How long would it be -- days, weeks, months -- before it was true?
'How the hell did we get into this mess?'"
The classic case is the Volstead Act of 1919.
For decades before its passage, its fanatical supporters, members of the Women's Christian Temperance Union, the Anti-Saloon League, and the Prohibition Party -- we're talking about the original "Botherhood of Man", here -- people who believed that drinking is a Bad Thing (which, indeed, it may be) and demanded a law to compel those whom they had been unable to persuade, to behave as if they'd been persuaded -- ignored complaints that they were making a mockery of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and of the traditional American respect for privacy and individual liberty.
For more a decade afterward, they ignored the secondary effects of alcohol Prohibition which proved more damaging to civilization than any use of alcohol ever had. Alcohol Prohibition never stopped people from making, selling, or using alcohol, but it is to blame for a great deal that's still wrong with America today.
For starters, it was the beginning of a widespread popular disregard for the law. In 1919, millions of ordinary, decent people who believed that they had a right to drink alcohol became outlaws overnight through no fault of their own -- that is, because of nothing that they did themselves. They responded by drinking more than ever -- many of them for the first time -- simply to assert that right.
Even worse, with the stroke of a pen, a previously acceptable variety of behavior was suddenly lumped together with acts that everybody agreed were wrong -- like murder and kidnapping. For millions of ordinary, decent people, moral lines in America became hopelessly blurred, and have tended to stay that way ever since. In a way that could never have happened if the do-gooders of the Women's Christian Temperance Union, the Prohibition Party, and the Anti-Saloon League hadn't meddled in their private affairs, millions of ordinary, decent people were suddenly, and for the first time, exposed not only to criminal violence, but to legally-sanctioned violence as well -- the axes and submachineguns of Eliot Ness and his thuggish colleagues -- just as if they were criminals themselves.
In 1919, millions of ordinary, decent people believed they had a right to drink alcohol and we all know how that turned out: bathtub gin, Al Capone. The federal agency created to enforce alcohol Prohibition burned 105 people to death -- more than a dozen of them children -- in Waco, Texas just last summer.
Are we capable of learning anything from history? Today, millions of ordinary, decent people believe they have a right -- and a duty -- to own and carry weapons. With 750 million firearms -- three quarters of a billion guns -- of modern design in working condition already in private hands in America today, how do you suppose the Brady Bill and the assault weapons ban are going to work? Forget your worries about the North Koreans -- what American city is the BATF going to nuke first?
As I often say, whereas libertarianism and conservatism are perfectly respectable -- if somewhat divergent -- political philosophies, liberalism is just another form of mental illness.
But before you conservatives in the audience begin feeling too smug, maybe it's time to examine your own mindset. You could be just as guilty of the same kind of self-righteous nonthinking. Liberals are often accused, and correctly, of believing that if a policy doesn't work -- say, banning guns -- the answer is to do it more.
Conservatives believe that if a policy doesn't work -- say, putting more people in jail, per capita, than any other nation in the world -- the answer is to do it harder.
Take the so-called "War on Drugs" ... please. The War on Drugs is nothing more than alcohol Prohibition dressed up for the 1990s. It certainly can't stop people from making, selling, or using drugs, any more than the Volstead Act ever stopped them from making, selling, or using alcohol, but it has succeeded in boosting the price of drugs from mere pennies a pound to hundreds of dollars an ounce -- which anyone who knows anything about economics will immediately recognize enormously increases the incentive to enter the illegal drug market.
It's driven the weakest competition out of the market and created not just a livelihood where there wasn't one before, but a monopoly for the most violent and ruthless criminals in the world today -- and, not incidentally, for millions of bureaucrats, politicians, judges, lawyers, and cops, honest and otherwise. It's corrupted every American institution at every conceivable level.
Worst of all, it's given the bureaucrats and politicians another excuse -- an excuse that appears acceptable to the media and the public -- to raise taxes exponentially and stamp CANCELLED across the Bill of Rights, especially the Second Amendment.
Never mind that what you do to your body is your business or you haven't any rights at all. Never mind that the one and only way to protect your children from drugs is simply the long, hard, grownup task of bringing them up right; let's start by abolishing public schools, which concentrate and distribute self-destructive behavior the way public hospitals concentrate and distribute disease.
Never mind that before the turn of the century, addictive drugs were freely available everywhere and nobody showed much interest in them. Never mind that there wasn't any drug problem -- I repeat, there wasn't any drug problem -- until your fellow voters, the bureaucrats, and the politicians created a drug problem.
From the original classic Star Trek, Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine through Babylon 5, TekWar, Time Trax, and Wild Palms, to the late, unlamented Space Rangers, the message we get from most science fiction is the same: the historically and politically unique civilization that was born at Concord Bridge -- and specifically constituted to prevent travesties like alcohol Prohibition, business Prohibition, drug Prohibition, or weapon Prohibition -- is headed nowhere now but toward an increasingly oppressive police state that has already nullified everything the Founding Fathers, and the Bill of Rights they left us, once stood for.
Unless you do something to stop it.
And wishing will not make it so.
“It suggests 2-3 weapons for every man, woman and child in the country.”
Those slackers better catch up.
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Well, those of us that like guns tend to really like them! In my circle of friends there are some of us that can go armed every day and not carry the same weapon twice for a month...or more! I’m currently shopping for the shortest legal 12 gauge side-by-side I can find. If I could get it down to under a foot w/out going to jail I would.
I’ve got a friend who phrases it as “I can fire a 21-gun salute without using any weapon twice”.
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