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08/09/2004 Archived Entry: ""Claire Wolfe time""

PEOPLE HAVE STARTED USING THE EXPRESSIONS "Claire Wolfe time" and "half past Claire Wolfe" to talk about how bad our loss of freedom is becoming. I can't tell you how strange it is to have my name becoming a metaphor for the moment a shooting war begins.

It must be an odd feeling to have one's name applied to any object or event, be it a sandwich or a boycott. But this is scary. Even scarier that I first saw both these expressions in the writings of complete strangers, so I can't tell myself it's just a handful of libertarian pals using them to twit me.

What's scarier is that I can no longer think of any moral reason not to "shoot the bastards." I can think of many, many pragmatic reasons not to attack government thugs and their bosses. I'm still not advocating that anyone commit violence (not even against TSA screeners, federal prosecutors, or cops at checkpoints -- though I understand the impulse).

But with freedom being sucked away and absolutely no one making any effective large-scale effort to restore it (but lots of people making effective large-scale efforts to destroy it), I can easily see how the next checkpoint or the next arbitrary detention or the next demand for biometric ID will simply be The Moment for some of us. Not just for the edgy Carl Drega people, either. But for good, solid, sensible people who must make the choice either to live with themselves or live as a cowed, obedient comrade of the Stalinist state being created around them.

Monkeywrenching, mini-gulching, and Outlaw enterprise -- three of the things I wholeheartedly do advocate -- can only go so far toward fighting tyranny. Or rather, they can go a long, long way, but they'll take generations to succeed, and such covert, black-market freedom efforts will likely end up creating a criminal subculture something like the one that so blighted post-communist Russia. Or for that matter, the one that now blights the worldwide recreational drug trade.

Sometimes survival of freedom's soul requires uttering a big, fat, frickin' loud, emphatic, get-out-of-my-face right this minute, no doubt about it, this planet ain't big enough for the two of us NO.

And that "NO" -- as governments understand and dread -- is best enforced at the point of a gun in the hands of a determined citizen willing and ready to use it.

Why must anyone be squeezed into making that choice in America, of all places? Nothing is more heartbreaking. Why the hell can't governments just get out of our way and let ordinary people go about their business unmolested?

Posted by Claire @ 09:26 AM CST
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