I had the idea to write an Election Day piece quite a while ago. What I had in mind back then in no way resembles what I’m about to write. It occurred to me, while reading a centrist appeal to vote for our values, that this election really comes down to holding our noses.

Bear with me awhile whilst I explain that.

Should we hold our noses and vote for socialized medicine, open borders, massive welfare, failed and evil victim disarmament, punish-the-successful economics, and appeasement-based foreign policy simply because the alternative is hostile to our values?

Should we hold our noses and vote for big-oil subsidization, library searches, illegal detainments, the so-called Patriot Act, illegal declarations of war, and an unnecessary invasion and occupation simply because the alternative is hostile to our values?

Should we hold our noses and spend our precious agent-of-change vote on a third party that we must, honestly, acknowledge cannot win at any state or federal level, simply because we wish a conscience free from the knowledge that we voted for ANY party hostile to our values?

Should we hold our noses and stay home – waste our precious agent-of-change vote, refusing to acknowledge the legitimacy of the rigged game by refusing to play?

Can it be that one option is as repugnant, or only slightly less so than every other? Is the only choice now left to us to pick between evils? What is to be our guide in choosing between equally bad?

Or perhaps the question is: How did we get to a point where our only choice is evil or evil?

I think I can answer that one. We got to this point by systematically removing the shackles of the Constitution from the American government. Each arm we unchain throws punches, each leg lashes out. Each tie we undo is one more place upon ourselves, of our own undoing. When we stopped applying the laws governing our government, we created the opportunity for tyranny, which has grown day by day, year by year.

I don’t know whether to blame ignorance or malice.

On one hand, there’s the innate human tendency to seek power, best exemplified by Lincoln’s Secretary Of State William Seward’s boast that he could ring a bell and have any man in the nation arrested at whim.

On the other hand, there’s the innate human tendency to try to raise up those in distress, best exemplified by Noam Chomsky’s assertion that the massive welfare nation must flourish for the good of the poor and destitute.

Let a man seek personal power under the guise of seeking charity and hospitality for all, and there’s no measuring the number of previously reasonable people he could bend to his cause. With the apparent blessings (and the votes) of reasonable people, there’s no measuring the political force that man could wield, the laws he could change in pursuit of fairness and justice.

We’ve seen it before – liquor was once blamed for all of society’s evils, by a majority of previously rational people. The putrid lies of “gun control” and “the drug war” had their roots in racism, but are now regarded as near gospel by what are deemed to be rational people. The invasion of Iraq came about because previously rational people demanded action based on the implied (and false) connection that Saddam Huessein was planning to attack America.

When we ask who is to blame for the evils and evil choices of today, we need only look at our neighbors, who advance an agenda handed down to them for the past 150 years. THEY are the ones who cannot recognize the evil their choices propagate, and so are doomed to repeat history.

Whether we vote for change or vote our values, vote Republican or Democrat, Green, Libertarian, or not at all, we are more or less not aware that the choice of evils that we face is ultimately the responsibility of people who were either too selfish or stupid to realize the monster they were loosing upon their country long ago, and of the people since then who were too selfish or stupid to put a halt to it when they had the chance.

We have been cast by those before us, for good or ill, into a position where the ONLY choices left to us are between a rock and a hard place, bad or worse.

It is no longer a choice between good and evil, right or wrong. It is no longer a choice between those who would bind government down and those who would give it powers it neither needs nor deserves. It is no longer a choice between freedom and tyranny, chains or liberty, life or death. It is a choice between tyrants who cast their tyranny in the light of fairness and common welfare, or those who cast their tyranny in the light of safety and protection. When measured by the yardstick that is our highest law, it is clear one side wishes to enslave us for our own protection, the other for our own well-being.

You cannot deny it. Those are the choices: Those and no other.

The question now becomes – what to do? Knowing that we have been doomed to this choice by the selfishness, stupidity, and cowardice of those who chose to either support evil and illegal policies, or go along to get along, how are we going to remedy the situation? How are we going to fix it? How are we going to make it right?

A far greater philosopher than I once said: “It is natural for man to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth, and listen to the song of that siren till she transforms us into beasts... For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it may cost, I am willing to know the whole truth, to know the worst, and to provide for it.”

That whole and painful truth is, now, that there is nothing we can do to make it right.
The situation is, in a word, hopeless.

Those before us locked us into this ugly conundrum, where no choice we make can matter. Like it or not, the choice has been for far to long, which evil will we pick. Like it or not, the vast majority of our fellow man is too selfish, stupid, or malicious to recognize that. We are now on automatic pilot. There is no way to reverse our course.

No choice we make now can reverse the evil. No checkbox on the ballot will fix things. No vote we cast will restore just, legal, constitutional government. It just won’t.

Any evil we choose only perpetuates itself. Any choice we make beyond that at the ballot box does not matter to anyone other than ourselves. Meanwhile, everyone keeps telling us that things just keep getting better and better.

As many have said, jokingly: “If voting could change anything, they’d make it illegal.”

But there is hope. The machine of government can only be strained for so long. It can only continue to debase the currency for so long. It can only continue to oppress people for so long. Despite the vicious cycle of evil vs. evil every 2 years, the machine will begin to break down. Probably economically first. Then, as control starts slipping away, the true nature of the beast will be revealed – in the form of capricious power, used at whim. More and more control will be asserted, until, at the very end, the choice will be between a flailing and failing prison state, and some sort of revolution – intellectual, political, or violent. I cannot say.

That’s the brightest future we can look forward to: That someday, probably sooner than later, something’s going to break.

That’s not much of a hope. Things are going to get much, much worse before they get even the slightest bit better. That hope, summarized, is that somewhere, down the road, some group of people will have to make a choice between the light at the end of the tunnel, and the darkness midway through.

Between then and now, our choices are evil and evil. For myself, I'll take this time to prepare, hold my noses and vote based on who gives us the most time for this preparation. I'll buy gold and silver. I'll buy guns. I'll privacy-proof my communications. Make plans to move through the nation without detection. I would ask that anyone who is able do the same. But most importantly, teach. Teach everyone we can reach, anyone who can possibly hear us, WHY our choices are between evil and evil. Teach them HOW we got to this point. Teach them to oppose, with cold mercilessness, the tyranny that selfishness and compassion and tyrannical power exercised for the good of your neighbor, for any reason, can bring.

Because someday, hopefully, the people we teach will be in a position to make that choice I talked about earlier.

Until then, we can only hold our noses.
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Found online. Pretty much mirrors my own thoughts. Comments?

Adrian