Rich Lucibella, you raise some excellent points, many of which I would not dispute. However, I might also add that free men have the luxury to debate the legal, moral, and political decline of the country in public on a web board. As far as I can tell, that freedom has yet to be abridged significantly, at least by any governmental entity.
Let's take a page from a newspaper printed during the 1920s (I don't have any specific one in mind here). What are the headlines? Liquor ... you can't buy it legally, as per an amendment to the constitution. Are you a Communist, anarchist, or even an outspoken labor representative? Careful, the "Red Scare" and J. Edgar Hoover are going to make exercising any of your rights pretty difficult. Black? Good luck getting a seat on a bus full of white people, remember to use the "other" bathroom, and don't complain that the white children go to better public schools than your own (because Plessy v. Ferguson was such a great example of Constitutional jurisprudence). And God hope the year isn't 1929, because it won't matter much what freedoms you feel you have when you're standing in a bread line with an empty stomach and no prospects.
Let's take another trip in the wayback machine, this time to 1861. I really hope you aren't black in that year. You can buy liquor, which is good, because when you realize that the country is about to dissect itself and offer up a generation or so to the greatest tragedy ever experienced within its borders to date, you'll want to drink (not to mention that the Federal government is going to significantly curtail some of your civil rights for the next several years). You won't need to worry about your rights being abridged because of your involvement in a labor movement, because those labor movements haven't developed much strength yet, and you're working 10+ hours days in unsafe conditions alongside 12 year old children. You get an occasional sick day when your TB gets too bad, although you might lose your job as well. If you're Mormon, you can throw religious freedom right out the window - that doesn't apply to you, unless you feel inclined to move to a distant territory.
I could go on, but hopefully I've made my point. This country has faced challenges before, it faces them now, and it will continue to face them in the future. Each time in the past, the nation has risen to meet those challenges, and for the most part come off the better for the challenge. Are there serious threats to the individual rights of citizens at present? Yes. Do they mean that the country is dying? No. They mean we have to work that much harder to hasten their reversal and to prevent just such a scenario. Hand-wringing about nascent totalitarianism is jumping several steps ahead of the game, historically speaking.
You stated:
Most Free Men really don't want to be Free in the first place; it frightens them to think they are on their own.
Then why bother doing any of this? If most free men don't want to be free, why bother continuing to or trying to impose freedom upon them (talk about internal contradictions!), since they'll never appreciate it anyway? If most free men don't want to remain free, then this whole conversation is moot, isn't it, because everybody here is fighting a losing battle in whatever way they propose to fight it? Furthermore, if what you say is true, that puts us in a pretty select, elite class - the "freedom-appreciators" if you will - fighting the battles for the betterment of an already free citizenry that consistently rejects it? Sorry, romantic idea (in the literary sense), but I don't hold my fellow citizens in such low contempt. I might think that we're in a period where a few too many of them are a little too quick to trade security for freedom because they're understandably (yet unjustifiably in many ways) scared of a scary world, and thus make decisions that will be regretted (and hopefully undone) in coming years (who doesn't make bad decisions?), but I think ascribing such a low opinion of the "free men" of this country is no better than the sheeple-slinging that some people regretably spout here. If what you say is at all true, we might as well let the proverbial SHTF right now, because the whole thing was doomed from the start.
Glass half full ... or glass half empty?
