In the fourth Star Trek movie, Final
Frontier, Mr. Spock's half-brother Sybok, part revolutionary,
part Vulcan Svengali, offers to free Jim Kirk of all his inner
pain -- as he has done for Scotty and McCoy -- if the Enterprise
captain will join his quest to find G-d.
"Don't take away my pain!" cries Kirk. "I need
my pain!"
I've thought about that scene often over the years, especially
after I put in several months as a regular co-host on a conservative
talk radio show where I was the resident expert on Second
Amendment
matters.
I had persuaded one of my publishers and the national bookseller
who sold more of my novels than anybody else to purchase
four weeks'
worth of advertising on the station. I give good radio, and
nearly
always light up the switchboard and jam the phone lines.
But in those
four weeks, the ads for my books failed to generate a single
response.
As you may imagine, I was embarrassed beyond my ability to
describe
it.
But that wasn't the worst.
By nature, I'm a problem-solver and, I freely confess, something
of a Utopian -- meaning that whenever I see anything I regard
as a political wrong I am absolutely driven to try to correct
it, so that the result comes closer to the vision I have in my
mind of a society worth living in and fighting for. You can see
some of this in my books The Probability Broach,
Pallas, Forge of the Elders, Roswell, Texas, and
also The Mitzvah and Hope, two novels I wrote
with Aaron Zelman, founder of Jews for the Preservation of Firearms
Ownership.
I have always brought exactly the same values with me, whether
to
the podium or the studio: identifying problems and generating
possible
solutions, always aimed at creating what Aaron calls a "Bill
of Rights
culture". However what I discovered during my stint
on this particular
radio station, is that many conservatives aren't interested
in solving
their problems. In fact, they actively resent anybody who
is foolish
enough to present them with ideas useful in defeating the
enemies of
liberty.
I've come to call individuals like this "dishonest players"
in the Great Game (Rudyard Kipling first gave it that name in
Kim) that we all must play in order to stay alive and
free. Some, maybe most of them, are simple "neophobes"
(to quote Robert Anton Wilson) who fear an unknown future -- even
if includes a totally free society -- more than they fear the
miserable but all-too-knowable state of the world today.
It is unfortunate that most human beings appear to be more
easily
moved by fear than by hope. As a species, we do not seem
to have been
constructed by evolution to experience much joy. We are vastly
better
equipped to tremble and suffer and lament, and bitterly detest
anyone
who won't join us enthusiastically in our trembling, suffering
and
lamentation. On the other hand, we entered the world ill-equipped
for
flying, but learned to do it anyway. Which is why, modern
views to the
contrary, we must confront nature -- especially our own --
and defeat
it.
Another kind of dishonest player is the professional "pro-gun
activist" whose vision of the future does not include
an end to gun
control. There are two varieties here, those who desperately
need the
constant threat of more gun control because they are desperately
lost
without it and have nothing else to do with their lives.
The other
sort are those who would starve to death if victim disarmament
went
away. Some of them work in a fancy office building and have
golden
parachutes.
Then there's the uppermost echelon of organizations like
that who
have turned out to be nothing more than shills for the Republican
Party, pursuing a political agenda that doesn't necessarily
have
anything to do with preserving the individual right to own
and carry
weapons.
Amusingly, they have their counterparts on the other side
of the
aisle, antiwar Democrats for whom the socialist agenda is
nevertheless
more important than ending a war or saving lives. They hate
the fact
that their favorite candidates are hawks, but don't want
to criticize
them for fear of derailing their election campaigns and with
them, the
agenda.
Then there are those -- usually older warriors who've spent
their entire lives in the general freedom movement -- who have
simply given up because they're politically worn out, and feel
helpless before what appears to them to be the implacable forward
march of socialism. What they don't realize, however -- what they
can't realize because the socialized school system and
the left-leaning mass media don't want to talk about it -- is
that socialism itself is worn out and on its deathbed. The monster
actually breathed its last breath quite a while ago, but like
the dinosaur it resembles, it's too dumb to realize it's dead.
However worst of the whole lot are those who would rather
complain
than actually do something effective, because they perversely
value
their status as victims more than they do their rights or
anybody
else's. Tell them it's possible to bring a total and permanent
end to
gun control, and they will tell you, in so many words, what
Kirk told
Sybok.
"Don't take away my pain! I need my pain!"
They dearly love to whimper about what big government and even
bigger corporations did to them yesterday, what big government
and even bigger corporations are doing to them today, and what
they think big government and even bigger corporations are going
to do to them tomorrow. Almost never is there any consideration
given to fighting back effectively, politically, right now, although
they spend lots of time, energy, and money on weapons and survival
equipment, getting ready for a physical fight -- which they will
lose gloriously, of course -- in a future that usually resembles
those bleak scenes in The Terminator where robot tanks
are running over piles of human skulls and crushing them.
They need their pain because it's the way they define themselves.
At one level or another, they're afraid they'll cease to
exist without
it. But it's time for these pathetic specimens to grow up
and to start
defining themselves, as the Founding Fathers did, in terms
of their
rights instead of wrongs, real or imaginary, they see happening
around
them.
Is that likely to happen any time soon? I can't say. A few
years
ago, an infamous anti-industrial, anti-capitalist greenie
lawyer (as
Paul Harvey says, he'd want me to mention his name) made
headlines
when he sued to stop a series of laboratory experiments that
might
someday -- no sooner than a generation or so -- result in
the medical
ability to regrow damaged nerves and severed limbs. He was
working, he
explained straightforwardly, on behalf of a group of handicapped
folks
afraid that if the experiments succeeded, they would be forced
to
accept the new treatment, losing their government benefits
and special
status.
To paraphrase Karl Marx, progress is the curse of the wheeled
class. That, apparently, is how much some individuals cherish
their
victimization.
Those of us who do not enjoy being victims have a lot of
work
ahead of us if we wish to remain free and not fight -- and
lose --
some dismal, cataclysmic future civil war. The Patriot Act
and similar
legislation most be disposed of. It has no place in a Bill
of Rights
culture.
But that's probably too much work for those who cherish their
victimization.
Licensed concealed carry of weapons by ordinary individuals
has
done a great deal to reduce violent crime, but it's trumped
in every
respect by "Vermont Carry" -- under which no license
or government
permission of any other kind is required to exercise your
right to own
and carry weapons -- a system much more consistent with the
Second
Amendment.
But that's probably too much work for those who cherish their
victimization.
The widely-rumored merger of the United States, Canada, and
Mexico
into a "North American Union" is not the unstoppable
juggernaut it's
said to be by those who cherish their victimization. Circulated
on the
net, a formal Declaration of Non-Recognition, signed by Americans,
Canadians, and Mexicans, would stop the NAU dead, as would
the right
kind of state or federal legislation. A Constitutional amendment
might
be nice, but that's probably too much work for those who
cherish their
victimization.
The Canada to Mexico "supercorridor", four football
fields wide,
could be killed in a few weeks by the legislatures of states
in its
path, but that's probably too much work for those who cherish
their
victimization.
Recently, several of the states have passed legislation refusing
to cooperate with federal program to make their driver's
licenses
compliant with a Bush Administration scheme to create a national
identification system. Now the _Kommandant_ of Homeland Security,
Michael Chertoff, has begun threatening them with various
illegal
sanctions. This would-be dictator needs to be booted out
of office and
jailed, but that's probably too much work for those who cherish
their
victimization.
More than anything, we need a penalty clause appended to
the Bill
of Rights that would punish any official, at any level of
government,
who violated anybody's rights under the first ten amendments
or tried
to abolish those amendments altogether. I've been thinking
that it
might be good to reopen Alcatraz for that purpose, and I'd
be willing
to toss in the first few bucks for rotting meat to chum the
bay for
sharks. But that's probably too much work for those who cherish
their
victimization.
The truth is that we don't have any time left for coddling
those
who cherish their victimization. They need to do something
real or get
out of the way. There's simply too much to be done if we're
going to
have a free society again instead of a coast-to-coast concentration
camp.
I don't need my pain.
Do you need yours?
=============================================================
Four-time Prometheus Award-winner L. Neil Smith has been
writing about guns and gun ownership for more than 30 years.
He is the author of 27 books, the most widely-published and
prolific libertarian novelist in the world, and is considered
an expert on the ethics of self-defense. His writings may be
seen on the following sites:
The Webley Page: http://www.lneilsmith.net
The Libertarian Enterprise: http://www.ncc-1776.net
The Probability Broach: The Graphic Novel, Roswell,
Texas, and TimePeeper (August 2007): http://www.bigheadpress.com
LNS at Random (blog): http://www.bigheadpress.com/lneilsmith/
LNS at JPFO: http://www.jpfo.net/filegen-a-m/lneilsmith.htm
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