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"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance."
-- Thomas Jefferson
All Hallow's Eve; Hallowe'en; the holiday so crucial to my personal journey of self-discovery. It's hard to believe it has been almost a year since HE won the election. How did it happen? Some said it was vote fraud, others said it was just a better run campaign. Me? I don't know, but am leaning to the former. Looking back at it, it couldn't have just been the pendulum swinging back, it was just too well orchestrated, too well thought out and played. In the end, we just rolled over.
"If you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a small chance of survival. There may even be a worse case: you may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves."
-- Winston Churchill
Surely they couldn't just repeal all our freedoms and protections granted in the last 10 years? Should have seen the writing on the wall, after the Supremes started mysteriously dying and were replaced with HIS selections. But like the frog that doesn't realize his fate as the heat is oh so slowly raised til he is boiling, we failed to observe the entire picture. I guess we have failed Freedom and Liberty. Maybe someone will see this in the future and realize what happened, but I am begining to lose hope that the human race has a future.
"The jaws of power are always open to devour, and her arm is always stretched out, if possible, to destroy the freedom of thinking, speaking, and writing."
-- John Adams
First came the repeal of all LGBT rights, followed by the inevitable court cases As the challenges went to the Supreme Court, surely they would overturn them, but we were to blinded by our own hubris and could not see it happening, the unthinkable. The new repeals were upheld. Now here I am, waiting alone in the dark on Hallowe'en, unable to get on my websites; Fictionmani, Storysite, TGEA, even TopShelf and Stardust, all 404's. Tried calling Erin; no answer. Same for Jenna, Cat, Holly, all of the people I know how to contact, no answer, as if they dropped from the face of the Earth.
I am afraid I am the last.
I am afraid of the coming knock on the door.
I hear several sets of footsteps coming up the stairs.
Do I make a stand or submit quietly, and fade away into history, never having the will to fight for my right to be.
Or, do I end it myself? I only have the single clip for the little Taurus Millenium Pro, only 12 rounds between me and freedom, of one kind or another.
Knock, knock, knock.
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Comments
Kinda sounds like the "first
Kinda sounds like the "first they came for the Jews, but I wasn't a jew" etc, etc. This is a rather good take on what politics can be if no-one pays attention to what is going on around them. Jan
Speaking of paying attention...
I normally just lurk here and enjoy reading many of the quite skilled authors' works. However, I couldn't let this pass.
1. The Taurus feeds off of magazines, not clips. This is important.
2. The people who are 'granting' as you say "all our freedoms and protections granted in the last 10 years" are the same people who will, shortly after granting those freedoms and protections, remove the right to keep and bear arms. So you wouldn't have that Taurus anyway. These are the people with a habit of passing ever stricter gun controls, just check their voting records. See Chicago, Washington DC and New York for examples.
Never ever trust anyone who gives you a 'freedom' at the cost of your right to self-defense. It's a Faustian bargain that never works out well. No matter what your political beliefs or agenda, it just never works out and eventually ends in tyranny, oppression, bloodshed and death.
The only question is when.
If you don't want to be oppressed in future and want to retain your natural rights, make sure your government representatives know that you do not want them to take your right to effective self-defense in the form of a firearm. As A.E. van Vogt said, the right to buy weapons is the right to be free.
Ben on this subject
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Benjamin Franklin
Good quote
Sadly, not believed by many current politicians, who use 9/11 as an excuse to curtail many liberties and freedoms, supposedly to increase our safety in the long term. There are numerous examples, but "No liquids on flights - including baby milk" was one of the daftest.
--Ben
As the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body, then only left-handers are in their right mind!
To h@!! with fading away
To h@!! with fading away quietly! If you can, get out the window and slip into the underworld. If you can't, shoot the buggers and then take the stairs out. Don't make it easy for "the man". Freedom has to be fought for.
And yes, I'm a Freehold fan...
Some days you're the pigeon, some days you're the statue
Freedom, and guns...
This was frightening because here and now feels very much like what was described as happening in it. I dont happen to agree that letting people carry guns has much to do with individual freedom, as for me guns are part of the stuff some people use to force other people to do what they would prefer not to, or to stop them doing what they like to do. I would like a world where guns dont exist anymore, and force or the threat of it are not how society runs its self. Humans being social animals, that actually like to be in groups and do things together, coercian just is not necessary for a society to work. Families can manage with Love instead.
IMHO as soon as some individuals start FORCING others to do Their will, that is the end of Freedom. The answer to such force used by a State is illustrated by what actually happened in the 1980s in Central Europe, when unarmed people went on the streets in huge numbers and told armed and very oppressive, controlling governments that they had had enough of them and that they were now being dismissed. In most places the regimes just folded. In a couple they got their armed thugs to put up a brief fight but even then they still lost.
Long ago, in my youth, I had the privilege of taking part in the overthrow of the government in the country I lived in and the reversal of its policy. It went to war, with an ally, conscripting its young men and sending them to fight, for the benefit of a corporation whose assets had been recovered from the nation from whom it had been taken by superior force, some generations before. We made the two countries that went to war ungovernable, their governments were changed, the war stopped, the surviving conscripts came home and soon after the disgraceful business of fighting wars with slave armies was abandoned. Nowdays, though they still make wars on others, at least the fools who go to war to kill and get killed do so voluntarily!
What the good people of Central and Eastern Europe in the late 1980s proved, for Everyone and for Ever, is that ultimate power rests with the People, and that no government can survive without at least the passive tolerance of the People.
I am saddened by the attitiudes of people in the UK and USA these days, most of whom accept so much dictatorship and control over themselves. I accept that life is more complicated than back when I was a student, that wrapping everyone in layers of debt for example, enables the Powers That Would Like To Be to control them and pry into their secret lives much more effectively, and that computers and the internet and telephones and the ubiquitous CCTV cameras ( even in public loos!) give Them more means for controlling us, but still, if we dont like it we CAN mess it all up and confuse them, just like back in my day.
It is still up to us whether we want to be free or to be slaves.
Briar
Briar
Unfortunately....
Those "peaceful" revolutions of the 1980s? Yeah, they're an anomaly in the stream of history.
In April of this year, 2009, huge numbers of of unarmed people gathered in Chisinau, Moldova and demanded that their government be dismissed. Brutal repressions followed and the revolution failed. The government is still there.
Right NOW, in Iran there are massive protests of the government going on on a nearly daily basis by the unarmed populace. This is being resolved by the hardline government by the simple expedient of machine-gunning the people when they gather and 'disappearing' surviving participants afterward. The government is still there.
Starting in 1999 with the outlawing of the Falun Gong religion in China, mass protests consisting of hundreds of thousands of unarmed people appeared in Beijing on a regular basis. Again, like others before then they demanded that they be allowed the right to their beliefs and that the government be dismissed. The reaction? Arrests, deportation to labor camps, torture, summary executions and 'disappearances.' The government is still there.
Do I even need to describe the Tien-an-men Square incident of 1989 again, and how that was brutally repressed by the Chinese Army? The government is still there.
So, no, most of the time mass unarmed protests do not do anything. The ones in the 1980s worked only because those countries were so desperately poor after being under the inefficient and wasteful yoke of socialism/communism for so long that they were desperate for something, anything to come along and save them - not just the people, but those running the governments of those countries.
Going back a bit further in history, perhaps you might want to enquire of a non-Jewish Holocaust survivor as to which he would have preferred to have in his hand when the Nazis came for him - a copy of the Weimar Republic constitution, which delineated the rights that the government was busily trampling on, or a gun? Remember that one of the first orders of business for Hitler was the creation of new gun control laws and the expansion of existing ones in the name of "crime control". Remember that most 'right thinking people' in Germany agreed with it.
Then remember that it wasn't just the disarmed Jews that were taken away to concentration camps for extermination a few years later. It was GLBTs as well as other people the government viewed as 'undesirables'. Few of those had guns with which to resist, having surrendered them like 'good citizens' for the promise of security, safety and prosperity offered by the government. (Sound familiar?)
And of those 'undesirables', the only ones able to successfully resist were those who had retained their arms despite the decrees against them. A few men, women and children armed with guns managed to hold the might of the Wehrmacht at bay for four months and exacted a heavy cost from their oppressors. The others who were unable to resist were carted away and killed. See the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
Without guns, the government may crush you with impunity. With guns, they may still try, but you can make them pay a heavy price - and before you ask "what can one man do?" - well, one man with a pistol managed to start World War I.
The difference between free men and slaves is that slaves do not own guns. That is the only difference, yet it makes all the difference in the world.
Excellent post
Excellent post Evil Ghost!
Briar, you said you wish for a world with no guns, where people just get along in harmony. (Yes, I'm paraphrasing...) If I could ask you to cast your mind back to a time when this world had no firearms... could you tell me what kind of social system was in place? Specifically, was everyone "equal" with no one in charge? No???
Or was it the case that 'before guns' society was a place where the nobles ruled and the unarmed unwashed masses obeyed. Where "might made right", and the big guy with the sword was obeyed because he'd kill you if you objected?
Oh, and remember that back in that world with no guns, men ruled. Women kept their mouths shut or suffered (or should I say "and suffered") the consequences. (Ever heard of a scolds' bridle? Look it up.)
Guns killed the age of chivalry. Thank god for that. Guns gave us our 'rights and freedoms'. Without guns, the big man rules the little man, the male rules the female, and everyone is unsafe. Think about it.
Here's are some quotes that I really like. "Abe Lincoln may have freed all men, but Sam Colt made them equal." And "God made man and woman, Sam Colt made them equal!"
Anyhow, I'm gonna get off my hobbyhorse now. One last thought I'd like to share.
Be careful what you wish for. You'd be horrified at the results of a world without firearms.
Some days you're the pigeon, some days you're the statue
Uh, What?
You are talking about alternative history if you think GUNS has ANYTHING to do with with Women's rights movements and feminism. If anything, if women had started fighting men, that would have just encouraged them to "put us back in our places". The real change was social. By your logic, women in countries that have banned guns should have fewer freedoms and suffer more sexism and abuse, while widespread guns means more women in power. I'd LOVE to see evidence to indicate anything of that nature.
Lets talk about governments. With modern military technology, any government and military that really doesn't give two whits about it's populace can blow away an entire city worth of people from a thousand miles away. Or just a single building. A single guided missile cruiser could more or less put a city in ruins, with "just" conventional weapons, all while staying far away from any small arms. With modern UAVs, loyalists could sit down in their bunkers while slaughtering wholesale the 'armed' populace.
What stops this? Not guns. The ONLY reason this doesn't happen is because the government is nothing without the country. Eventually, even the staunchest loyalists lose the willpower to destroy their own land. They CAN'T afford to slaughter their own population or make them all enemies. It doesn't matter if civilians have sticks and stones or stinger missiles, the government will ultimately collapse without the support of it's population. If they really want to kill us, they can. Period.
nonfiction
I love your work, but I feel it has been classified incorrectly here. Truth is not fictional in any nature, and you are showing us many truths. the Niemoller quote is very appropriate here. I look at our xenophobic society and see the "patriot act" to protect us from those with other views of the world. I see the persecution of Mexican-Americans both legal and illegal. Congress is investigating musl;im Americans whose only crime is their choice of religion. This all smacks of McCarthyism at its worst.We must all remember that unless we defend the rights of every individuaol, then no one has any rights at all.