Prepare yourself for a meat-filled rant that is guaranteed to knock your socks off! Or maybe it's Tofu. Yeah yeah, if you're a Veggie, I made this from Tofu and if you're a carnivore, this is blood-red meat-filled goodness baby. Well, it's good stuff, okay? Alright!, it's marginal and it's rooted solely in baseless opinion.

My dad sent along one of those messages that contrasts what life is like in America today versus 50 years ago and coupled with my recent reading of the excellent "Can America be saved from Stupid People" by Dave Duffy, I thought I'd toss out a few observations while spewing opinions all over your screen.

Briefly from Dad's note (what 50 years can do):
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Scenario: Jack pulls into school parking lot with rifle in gun rack.

1956 - Vice Principal comes over, takes a look at Jack's rifle, goes to his car and gets his to show Jack.

2006 - School goes into lockdown, FBI called, Jack hauled off to jail and never sees his truck or gun again. Counselors called in for traumatized students and teachers.
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Perhaps we're more "enlightened" now and realize that all gun owners are psychopaths or just plain toothless hillbilly wannabes. Or perhaps, just maybe, the very few with the loudest voices and plenty of cabbage have been successful in trying to disarm the people of this country; It's a crucial step to enslavement, you know. While Diane Feinstein "champions" stricter gun control she also has a permit to carry a concealed weapon, something I couldn't get unless I planned on changing jobs. In HER view, *I* don't need to carry a concealed weapon, but SHE does. Is her human life any more important than mine? SHE feels like she's in constant danger and needs a gun on her person. But she's certain that mine is not needed or that I couldn't possibly possess the skills to carry such a thing responsibly. And even if I could, there *might* be an accident with my gun -- Better to just keep that shit away from me, for everyone's sake.

How did this occur? How have we changed so much over the last 50 years? Certainly the pervasiveness of TV and 24 hour news channels has contributed. A 60 second spot highlighting an accidental shooting by a boy upon his friend horrifies people who immediately become ready to support legislation for tighter gun control. Even though more kids die of drowning in shallow buckets of water each year than do by accidental shootings, we see gun laws tightened while no action is taken against those perilous pales.

Thousands of laws have been passed now which restrict our freedom. I cannot legally walk across the street to my neighbor's place with a cracked-open beer to say hey and shoot the breeze; That would be drinking in public and a legitimate reason to be hassled by the cops. They rarely do such a thing but it actually happened to me. I wasn't walking around town with an open case of beer, I cracked my first beer of the day and was two houses away from my own place when a 20-something cop decided to hassle me and eventually have me pour out my beer in the street.

Perhaps the beer incident doesn't seem like much on the surface but the very real and terrifying implication is, the cop could sit there and interrogate me and worse because of a stupid law which was probably "sold" on the notion that if it didn't exist we'd see the streets flooded with drunks while beer bottles rolled in the street. We've just given the omnipotent (the government) the power to silence us.

What if I began taking an active dissenting view and the government didn't like what I was saying? Guess what... there are enough "laws" on the books to ensure that I'm breaking one of them at any given time. It is [virtually] impossible to exist in this country while in the pursuit of happiness without breaking *some* law, so you are *always* at risk.

"Don't be afraid of wire tapping because if you're not doing anything wrong you don't have anything to be worried about". We're ALL doing something wrong on most days, as far as the law is concerned. And so the oppression begins, because you have to stay "under the radar" or risk being hassled (interrupting your pursuit of happiness), fined, jailed or worse. Opining with dissent becomes an extremely risky business.

In China any dissenting voices found are jailed or otherwise "handled". They don't give the people the right to vote on things so they can get away with it. What we're doing now (and have been over the last 75 years) is actually *consenting* to allow the same things to occur to ourselves. "Nah!, you're overblowing it Tom", is what I hear sometimes. We have the highest incarceration rate of any "free" country in the world... why is that? Most (most!) of those in jail are not there for committing crimes which affect others, they're in there for having 'weed' (or some other drug) and are there because they broke the law, one that was put in place because, "if we let folks smoke weed, one of them MIGHT get behind the wheel of a bus and crash into a bunch of people". I say fuck that shit! Let them be and if someone does crash into a bunch of people, THEN jam their ass into a prison cell; Or a coffin for all I care. We're incarcerating people for doing things that MIGHT put them in a position to POSSIBLY do something wrong. Preventative jailing. Nice.

We've gotten soft, folks -- We've gotten stupid too. We need to fire the people on Capitol Hill and put reps in there who want to keep this the "Land of the Free". It's not because I want to smoke weed or carry a beer across the street; It's because I want to be able to tell the government that they suck when they do and not worry about being jailed because of it, due to some [very well planned] loophole in the legal system.

How has this happened? It seems very simple to me: Giveaways! Those who would enslave us (Asses and Elephants alike) would never be voted into office on the basis of pure restriction as a platform. They play to the largest group of people (those with less) and promise to GIVE them some of the stuff from the smallest group of people (those with more). It's a dizzying and irresistible pheromone to much of the population. Let's face it, work is HARD and the notion of getting something for "free" has quite an allure to it. Of course, it's not "free", it's bundled with freedom-removing action too. If you want those giveaways you're gonna have to deal with rights that they plan on removing from you. But those details are buried in small print while the "fun", "freebie" stuff is overstated, restated, stated again and yet again, just to be sure you got the message about the "free" stuff. If I didn't make it clear... "Vote for me for more FREE!".

We need to resist the sugar and vote for people who give two shits about us and our rights. I'm talking about rights for which thousands upon thousands have sacrificed. I'm talking about the serious "Give me Liberty or give me death!" cries from those who came before us from whom this land has been endowed. America was once GREAT; It had heart and people bled to keep it free. During WWII people wailed and agonized over the loss of their sons and daughters; They fell to their knees with inconsolable grief; They replayed the memories of their children in their heads and found solace ONLY in knowledge that what they had given up gave allowance to the rest of them; And all of us who would follow. Folks: We're pissing that away. It's shameful.