“Get the government out of our lives!!!” This was the response to a recent post I made about the FDA and unregulated Holistic Cures. ‘Be careful what you wish for,’ immediately comes to mind. Is that really what you want? Are we ready to be self-regulating, self-governing? Can we be trusted to act responsibly, morally, and ethically? You should already have the answer in mind.
A simple glance around you will remove any doubt and hopefully, scare the shit out of you. Pick a subject or pick a topic and tell me that we, mankind, are not to blame. I’ll go even further and state that our greed and lust for power are the primary drivers. Can you imagine where we’d be without government oversight and regulation? Granted, there are problems with that oversight and regulation as well. That just proves my point. If the people that we hire and trust to protect us are corruptible, how can we trust each other?
We have found creative ways to corrupt every facet of our lives which should illustrate our inability to make good decisions and to assume responsibility for our actions. Why do you think we invented government? Back millennia ago when the first small family groups of people gathered together for protection, they needed a leader; someone to set the direction and assume overall responsibility for health and safety. This was originally someone with a self-proclaimed connection to god: a religious leader. That’s worked out well so far. It turns out that person was power-hungry and greedy, too, so we expanded this original proposition and created a massive self-perpetuating power-sink and financial vortex called government. The problem is that we the people, have abdicated our accountability and allowed this creation to grow out of control. This speaks volumes about our capability to manage ourselves when we cannot seem to manage the entity, monster, we created to manage and protect us.
Turn off your emotional responder for a moment and consider your life in a totally free society; one with no government, no laws, no police, no one watching out for you except you and your neighbor; no one telling you what to do. Utopia, right? How long could we maintain this utopia? How long before we would be far worse shape than we are now? How long before vigilante groups formed to manage the chaos that will ensue? Who will protect you from the people that don’t want to live moral, ethical, and responsible lives? How quickly will this spiral out of control? Then what?
If our goal is to extricate ourselves from governmental control, we need to take the responsibility upon ourselves and begin living moral and ethical lives. All of us, not just a few or most. All of us or this will not work. You see, that’s our societal problem. We all want a life free from our government, but we’re not adult enough to actually do it. YES, this is meant as an indictment, no, an accusation. We are not even capable of electing the right people to represent us or managing them.
We blame everyone and everything except ourselves for our failures. We complain in every social media forum possible but refuse to do what we know is right. That is, to be more selective and elect the right people for these positions. Processes exist to remove these miscreants from office, but again, we fail to use the process and bitch about it and our inaction. How’s that working for you?
When everyone, and I mean everyone, is living ethical, responsible, and moral lives we can minimize government oversight and control. This begins with self-control and personal responsibility. It begins with a solid moral compass, not an etch-a-sketch. It begins with taking responsibility for our actions and decisions and correcting our mistakes.
So now you see that this will not happen tomorrow or in the next few decades. Maybe never. The government we have right now is the government we put in place, so it is the government we deserve. It is ours. We own it. We control it. We can fix it or ignore it.
The changes begin with each of us first. Once we are in control of ourselves, we can tackle the rest of the country.
Eldridge Cleaver (Beavers’ Granddaddy) said: “There is no more neutrality in the world. You either have to be part of the solution, or you’re going to be part of the problem.” This is often misquoted as “You are either part of the solution or you are part of the problem.” Not quite the same thing, but I think you get the idea.
And… Be careful what you wish for…
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