Think of what we’re trying to do: upend the biggest, deadliest, most intractable apparatus of power this world has ever seen.  The sheer scope of the Leviathan State is so daunting that any patriot who seeks to take it on is immediately faced with the enormity of his task—and that is sure to overwhelm even the most determined.

If they’re reading our emails, tracking our phone conversations, compiling dossiers on potential rebels—and all with the sort of technology that, at its highest level, is almost like magic—how can we possibly hope to overthrow this monster that has fastened itself on our backs?

Maybe it’s old age, or its rapid approach.  After all these years of “activism,” where has it got us—or, rather, where has it got me?  Very close to Nowhere.

Sure, there’s a libertarian “movement,” such as it is.  We even have a presidential candidate with the last name of Paul who is now the alleged frontrunner for the Republican Party nomination.  I smell 1964 all over again, and how far will that get us?  Not far enough, because the crisis isn’t imminent; it’s already passed.  As the great Garet Garrett put it so long ago:

There are those who still think they are holding the pass against a revolution that may be coming up the road.  But they are gazing in the wrong direction.  The revolution is behind them.  It went by in the Night of Depression, singing songs to freedom.

An updated version of this might be “It went by in the Night of 9/11.”  It was, after all, an explosion on a grand scale, a crash heard round the world—a signal event quickly followed by what may well have been the harbinger of another Great Depression.  Indeed, the present era resembles the pre-war era in many more ways than I have space to note here.  Suffice it to say that the rumblings of economic instability and another great war coming down the pike are disturbing our dreams and making the bed shake: One awaits with trepidation President Hillary’s first fireside chat.

There I go again—another note of pessimism, like a black cloud suddenly covering the sun.  But what if the sun is extinguished?  What if the American people have been so corrupted by modernity and the comforts of slavery that they no longer know who and what they were?

In that case the impulse to escape into my garden becomes irresistible.  Instead of battling omnipresent error, one is only burdened with fighting off the omnipresent weeds.  Rather than nurture a cadre of liberty-loving fighters, and watch them blossom into full-fledged libertarian ninjas, I need only fertilize my roses and sit there on the deck, watching as they wave gratefully in the breeze.  Why bother persuading those who are hostile to both knowledge and virtue, when I can have more luck herding my cat into the house as night menaces the day?

I am torn, especially on days like this when I begin to notice the ailments of age creeping up on me like the relentless advance of yellow clover (Medicago minima) over a carefully nurtured expanse of green lawn.  My kidney stones presage the painful death I imagine awaits me—so why not drop this banner I’ve been carrying all these years and enjoy life while I can?

Yet I cannot look away.  There is beauty in the destruction of the world I have known, a fierceness that I savor in the hawks as they fly overhead—or are they vultures?—looking for prey and dashing down to seize it.  There is nobility in the futile resistance of their victims as they struggle to escape beak and deadly claws.  They do what they must—and therein lies the answer.

I am reminded of the poet who saw further than anyone I have ever known:

While this America settles
in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily
thickening to empire,

And protest, only a bubble in
the molten mass, pops and sighs
out, and the mass hardens,

 

I sadly smiling remember that
the flower fades to make fruit,
the fruit rots to make earth.

Out of the mother; and through
the spring exultances, ripe-
ness and decadence; and
home to the mother.

There is beauty, too, in these tears that fall even as I write, that flow in spite of my embarrassment—even though I am alone, and there is no one to see, no need to reveal.  I savor their bitterness, like a cup of rare tea, and they give me strength, somehow, to take up the banner once again.

Is there hope?  Nope—but “shine on, perishing republic.”  I do what I must.