First of all, I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Professor Glenn Reynolds for the recent link from Instapundit. I am honored and grateful that he found my contributions to the Great Discussion worthy of noting.
Secondly, thank you for taking your time to read what I'm writing. If you like what you're reading, I hope you'll take the time to actually forward a link on to your family and friends. I'm working on a theory that email forwards, not blogs themselves, are actually the new form of pamphleteering.
Finally, I think we're getting closer to figuring out what these protests are all about. At Instapundit, Professor Reynolds links to a post that says the Chicago Tea Party is a quest for our nation's soul.
I'd say that's close, but lacking a cigar. Does this feel like a quest to you? Like we're going to strap on our armor and go slay a dragon? It doesn't feel like that to me. To me it feels like any minute I could get sucker punched in the stomach, kicked in the head, and brought to my knees. This isn't a quest, this is a fight.
And what are we fighting for? The stimulus is signed. The governors, most of them anyway, are going to take the money. Yet still we gather, and the movement is gathering steam. We know what we're protesting against, but it almost feels like we can't quite agree on what we're advocating. It's on the tip of our tongue, but we're unable to recall it. It's a word we use a lot, but we rarely truly think about.
The word we're looking for is "liberty."
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What form does "liberty" take? Are we expecting to come out of some protests with an end to the Drug War, the full attainment of the right to keep and bear arms, decriminalization of whatever acts of commerce two adults consensually agree to (my personal definition)? Or are we defining liberty as how things were 100 days ago? Total replacement of the government? Recouping unspent "stimulus" funds, getting the government out of the real estate business, and providing real stimulus via tax relief for the responsible taxpayers/home owners/businesspeople? "If you're looking for the answer then you've gotta ask the question..." "Liberty" is a lofty goal, but for effective action, some vague agreement about what the deliverables and criteria are is a practical necessity.
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