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If someone stuck a gun in your face as you strolled along the sidewalk on a pleasant summer evening and stole all your money, would you be upset?
If someone broke into your house, trashed your belongings, and pissed in your bed, would you be perturbed?
If someone spread malicious gossip about you at work and left you ostracized, would you be dismayed?
If someone physically assaulted you in a park then raped and left you bleeding in the wet grass, would you be agitated?
When the normal, peaceful fabric of a person's life is torn into tatters by a callous stranger bent on the destruction of what that victim holds dear, he is most likely to be hurt, frightened, and furious. Unexpected and unjustified violence leaves the individual's world reeling and unstable. Disruption of someone's existence for no good reason can engender outrage at the unwarranted and unfeeling intrusion. To be violated in one's home or body when all one seeks is to live undisturbed and according to one's own desires renders the world an unpleasant and repulsive place to be.
Faced with such vicious transgressions of the parameters we have established for ourselves, few of us could -- or would want to -- view those devastating actions with dispassionate unconcern. Few of use could -- or would want to -- place no more importance on behavior that devastated our peace of mind than we would on a broken fingernail. Few of us could -- or would want to -- treat the pain and the anguish and the trespass as a mere difference of opinion, an intellectually stimulating subject but of little overall significance or import.
Most of us -- hopefully, every one of us -- would take such sick desecration intensely personally.
At least I would like to think so.
But when it comes to freedom -- and freedom means nothing if it is not the freedom of specific, individual human beings -- when it comes to freedom, most people can muster nothing more substantive than a figurative yawn of indifference.
Fortunately -- or unfortunately -- I am not built that way.
I take freedom personally. Very personally. Intensely personally.
My freedom is not some inconsequential political point. My freedom is not an aloof, academic topic for discussion. My freedom is not some vague, poorly grasped, floating abstraction with no practical relevance to my day-to-day existence. My freedom is not a parlor game.
I take freedom personally. I take it seriously. I take it as vitally essential to who and what I am.
This is my life. It belongs to me.
I do not grant the right of any person -- relative, friend, or stranger -- I do not accept the sick notion that anyone has the right to a second of my life; the right to a penny of my money; the right to a sliver of my property without my permission.
This is my life. It belongs to me.
If someone dares to pretend that he has the "right" to interfere in any way, shape, or form with my peaceful behavior, he is -- on a very fundamental level -- my sworn enemy. Anyone who would forcibly interpose himself between me and my goals for his own purposes deserves contempt, not politeness.
This is my life. It belongs to me.
He who arrogantly assumes that because he has the power to compel me by threats (implied or stated) to do his bidding that I should meekly comply without complaint or resistance or protest to his obstruction of my choices is a dictator at heart. He has no conception of the requirements necessary to lead a real human existence.
This is my life. It belongs to me.
People who disagree with this are not merely expressing "another opinion." They should not expect a civil discourse from me when they proclaim that others -- which usually translates into them -- get to decide what I may or may not do. There is no "balancing" my freedom and my enslavement. Freedom is either/or. Only slavery comes in degrees.
This is my life. It belongs to me.
Those who make excuses for the debasement of my freedom, who pretend that the destruction of my freedom is no big deal, who grow indignant or contemptuous that I am incensed at the brute force attacks on my freedom, who declare that "compromise" is the goal to be sought, who maintain that freedom is nothing more than a technical "procedural dispute"; these people are no friends of mine and definitely no friends of freedom.
This is my life. It belongs to me.
My freedom is more important than someone's injured "feelings." Those who bristle at having the truth of their statist and collectivist beliefs and actions merely identified yet see nothing wrong when they minimize or dismiss the reality of the negative consequences their beliefs and actions produce are worthy of neither respect nor consideration.
This is my life. It belongs to me.
When I hear someone appeal to the "greatest good" or see that person identify first with his gang, his group, his tribe rather than view himself -- or me -- as an individual whose autonomy may not be suppressed no matter what the rationale, that person announces how dangerous he is to those who oppose him...and to their freedom.
This is my life. It belongs to me.
Those who want to be taken "seriously" while simultaneously supporting policies that infringe upon my rights as a human being will be taken "seriously" only as my opponent, my foe. Anti-life, anti-freedom pronouncements are consigned to the trash where they belong. Irrationality does not deserve to be dignified as though it were simply a variant of reason. Those who would sell out my freedom -- let alone their own -- for an illusory security are the handmaidens of their would-be masters. Let them place chains around their own necks if they so desire and gaze adoringly up into the faces of those who pretend to "protect" them, but leave me -- and my freedom -- alone.
This is my life. It belongs to me.
People who view freedom and rights as nothing more than pragmatic fictions created by a social majority, who sneer at and wave aside the moral foundations of both, who view these critical components of humanity as fluid and insubstantial wraiths, who cling to the false belief that we "enjoy more freedom" than ever; these people are fools whose blinders sustain their fantasy that now-is-the-best-of-all-possible-worlds.
This is my life. It belongs to me.
I take freedom personally because I can no more separate my right to liberty from my right to life than I could divorce my mind from my brain. Anyone who denies the reality of freedom or attempts to diminish its importance in the slightest fashion through word or deed is a despicable criminal no more deserving of tolerance than is a rapist, a robber, or a murderer. He has declared himself exempt from the requirements of peaceful human society and therefore exempt from human forbearance, as well. He should be dealt with as would any wild beast preying upon the innocent. It is him or me. His life or mine.
It gets no more personal than that.
