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Extinguishing the Flame "O ye that love Mankind! Ye that dare oppose not only the tyranny but the tyrant, stand forth! Every spot in the old world is overrun with oppression. Freedom hath been hunted round the globe. Asia and Africa have long expelled her. Europe regards her like a stranger and England hath given her warning to depart. O receive the fugitive and prepare in time an asylum for mankind."Amazing what a difference two-and-a-quarter centuries makes. Amazing . . . . . . and sad. When Thomas Paine penned the words above, no nation existed founded on the ideal of liberty. No country could boast of a society that had been consciously created with a proviso explicitly subordinating the government to the individual people who comprise that land. No "United States of America" could be located on any map. When Thomas Paine wrote his pivotal work in the impetus to revolution, his adopted homeland faced occupation by British troops, excessive taxes, and threats to bring the "colonists" to heel. The king and his supporters favored disarming the recalcitrant bumpkins across the Atlantic to teach them who resided at the top of the power pyramid. When Thomas Paine published a book that became an American bestseller, many of his neighbors wanted nothing more than to reconcile with their cousins in England. The solid and staid politicians and community leaders scoffed at radicals such as Paine and Patrick Henry who proclaimed that treason was a moral option; that the thirteen colonies would fare better shed of royal chains; that tyranny and hubris demanded separation and independence for the oppressed. Paine rightly pointed out the bleak prospects for freedom existing in the world in the fateful year of 1776. Monarchy and dictatorship appeared to be the natural state of mankind. In Europe, one State battled another in a never-ending revolving door of war and conquest and occupation. The leaders of the various States relied on "divine right" or heredity or tradition to justify their sacred and privileged place at the pinnacle of their respective societies. Obeisance and esteem became their due — not for anything they had done to deserve such loyalty, not for any aspects of their personality that deserved recognition and praise — but merely because they existed. Such liberty as did breathe walked only under the suffrage of higher authorities, greater needs, deeper desires than those of any petty individual. Recognition of rights came subject to strings and conditions that would have repercussions far beyond the late Eighteenth Century. After a long, exhausting, and highly uncertain rebellion, the fledgling United States of America emerged as a sovereign nation of voluntarily associated states. The people of those thirteen divergent jurisdictions set up a servant — a federal government — designed to handle those few situations of concern to them all. The citizens knew they could dismiss that servant at any time they chose should its work prove unsatisfactory. In no conceivable universe could the various architects of these United States imagine that the servant would one day warp "service" into a situation in which the employers required permission from the employee in order to act in every area of life; in which the employee determined his own wages and the scope of his duties and powers; in which the created would claim temporal and legal priority over the creators; in which the masters became the slaves, and their lives, their fortunes, their honor could and would be sacrificed at the whim of the usurper. In the era of Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, of George Washington and James Madison, the leading citizens recognized and valued the rarity and the sanctity of the jewel they had crafted. The intrigues of Europe; the maneuverings for ascendancy among such rivals as England and France; the dangers of entanglement in those twisted and complicated webs of deceit and treachery; such perils menaced the growth of their infant nation. The Founders wisely shunned the alluring appeal of the Sirens of Power and Prestige and Empire. The evidence of past abuses stood in stark contrast to the society they treasured and sought to establish: a society in which average people decided for themselves, for ill or good, how to live and then dealt with the consequences of those choices; in which citizens kept what they earned and pursued their happiness as befitted their individual circumstances; a community dedicated to the rights of the individual, a community that only infrequently interacted with its weak and submissive servant. Despite the glaring inconsistencies inherent in its structure; the sad legacies of untold millennia of abuses and ignorance; the unforeseen consequences of its dreams, the fire that was the United States of America burned the more brightly for the darkness lurking all about. Rather than seeking mythical dragons to slay, Americans preferred preserving the sanctuary of freedom they had carved from the physical and cultural wilderness encroaching upon all sides. Given the novelty of what our spiritual ancestors accomplished, it is a marvel they built as well as they did. The first to venture forth onto uncharted and hazardous waters can be forgiven lapses in judgment, evasions of knowledge, gaps in awareness and execution. Beyond those failings, though, they are not to be blamed for the distortions that followed of what they sculpted; for the willful ignorance of what they said and wrote; for the greed and mendacity and evil of those plodding in their steps, those corrupted souls who sold their heritage and ours for the tarnished tin of comfortable lives lived at others' expense. In describing the freedom-free realms of Africa and Asia, the oppression in Europe, the hostility to liberty rampant in England and France, Thomas Paine could easily have been decrying the world of today. In Britain, self-defense is outlawed and defenders jailed while the outlaws preying upon the innocent are released to strike again. Prying electronic eyes stand on every corner, peer into every crevice, record every move. Expression is controlled and limited, legal precepts inverted, personal choice forbidden. Britain's longtime rival, France, now shares the cloak of the English Nanny State. Working too much is verboten; everyone expects everyone else to pay for his health care, his retirement, even his vacations; education becomes a right enforced and a good provided by the State; the group reigns supreme. Australia treads the fascist path. New Zealand retreats from even modest reforms. Hong Kong falls under the increasingly tightening grip of Red China. Africa is a basket-case of repression and genocide, as countries from South Africa to the Middle East compete in a race towards savagery. The brittle former Soviet Union explodes into a myriad of collectivist fiefdoms. People starve while the military swells in North Korea. Everywhere, tyranny is worshipped beneath its grinning mask of "compassion" and "social justice" and "equality." Its vampiric handmaiden, the United Nations, is united primarily in sucking the last vestiges of liberty from the small, cowering enclaves where freedom is not yet a profane word. The world has shifted from Adam Smith to Tony Blair, from Frederic Bastiat to Jacques Chirac, from Thomas Jefferson to George Bush. The fragile candle glow nurtured to life in America and preserved here for so long is flickering, starving from lack of oxygen and adequate fuel. How much longer will we — can we — sit idly by while tyrants large and small rush to extinguish that fugitive flame, eager to destroy the first — and the last — asylum for the freedom-loving members of mankind?
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