Monday, March 22, 2010

Is It Time to Take Up Arms?

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.
-Thomas Jefferson
United States Declaration of Independence

Sunday, as we all know, the House of Representatives passed the very controversial Health Care "Reform" bill. This is the first law in American history to require every American purchase a product, regardless of need or want, but merely to exist in this nation. Due to the opposition of around fifty eight percent of the American population to this bill, there is a pot full of seething anger and resentment. Add to this the dirty tricks that the Speaker of the House was prepared to implement to force this bill through, the dirty trick that Were used, the possible...., well let us call it bribery for lack of a better term, and the arm twisting to the point of some members of congress needing health insurance for various fractures and serious shoulder joint dislocations, and you have a very hot fire under an already unstable pot. All of this seems to me to be a recipe for disaster, and any moment the pot could boil over.

There are four ways to affect a change in government. First we have the coup d'état, typically led by the military. I consider this to be the least likely scenario. We as a nation have too much control over our armed forces, and this usually happens, as the definition linked above states, in unstable countries with little experience in democratic forms of government. A particularly horrible thought about this scenario, the military typically makes for rather poor leaders of nations, and often end up as some of the most tyrannical and repressive governments ever seen on Earth. Secondly we have the little brother of the coup d'état, the take over from within. This was common in the Roman and Egyptian Empires. There it was a time honored tradition to off your ruler and take their place by way of you own royal blood until such time as your successor offed you and so on and so forth. I also find this to be an unlikely scenario, though there are some who claim that Johnson took out Kennedy, but no matter. This I do not consider a change in government due to the fact that the only change is at the top, and the new administration often bears more than a strong resemblance to the last.

Our third way of effecting a change in government, is voting the rascals out of office. This I view as the most likely method of a turn over in our government. The unfortunate result of this method, is you find that you have unwittingly installed a different bunch rascals that are no better than the bums you just tossed. The fourth, and final, method is an armed uprising by the populace. Most Americans recoil in horror when this is presented as an option. They say, "We are not South America." Indeed we are not, but consider our history, an armed uprising is exactly what led to the formation of our great nation. We took our freedom from King George at the point of a musket.

Having given that mini history lesson, I feel that I can safely that America does indeed have a history of armed insurrection. So having established that armed rebellion by the people is in fact in the Nature of the American citizen, I ask you, is it time now to take up arms and revolt? Leave aside the chances of success and the bloodshed that a modern civil war would entail. I ask a reasonable question that I have not seen anywhere except for the ramblings of the loonies and the white supremacists. My opinion is that most are afraid to simply ask the question, is it time? My personal opinion is that a civil war would leave us battered and broken as a nation. This opinion I base on the results of the last Civil War we fought, and the fact that unlike last time, there would not be two distinct region duking it out such as neighboring nations do, but the fact that the likely combatants are all mixed in together throughout the nation, by and large.

I know that many would consider this sedition, but after careful study of the requisite statuates, I feel secure in my own right to ask this question. My goal with this post is to see how others feel, not to start a rebellion of my own, but to gauge the sentiment of others out there in the blogger community. While I generally dislike anonymous comments, this time I know that many will be due to a, well founded I think, sense of paranoia of our own government. With that, I declare the forum open, and leave you with this bit of video from Johnny Tremain.


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