Maybe you won't notice a rights crackdown if it's dreary enough. In fact, your president banks on it. His side also thinks you're stupid, although they frame it gently as if it's just a matter of needing supervision like the babysitters they strive to be. America is not in danger of becoming some comical commie parody like the colder Korea, as we'll still have real McDonald's and NFL franchises. But life will be boringly irksome, not to mention that we'll be surpassed in nuke totals within about five years.
It's time to revolt against the revolting drag on both responsibility and leisure, as sleep offers the only escape from the hassling unless you unfortunately dream of waiting to be audited in an emergency room. For the record, calling to end federal intrusiveness is not to panic liberals worried about mean guns being held by crabby rednecks taking over the country. For now. Instead, those who modestly want their lives back should merely support candidates who don't really want the job and would barely show up if they won.
Whether shrewd enough to know what's happening next or dim enough to be surprised about the upcoming federal shift, we're all about to be expected to accept that saintly patience and excessive sighs are side effects of desiring to have one's body repaired. Lugging around the unbearable burden of Obamacare is already shaping up to be a little too perfect of a metaphor for contemporary life. Your body would be doing all of us a favor if it heals itself during a shift-long emergency room wait. Have you even tried to enhance your body's self-defense mechanisms by breaking into an atomic test area?
The madcap hospital misadventures would be funnier if the pending wait times didn't mean facing your mortality a little sooner than you had scheduled. But complying with a dictionary's worth of paperwork to get a limb reset or miscreant pancreas removed is now what healing is about. In an effort to reduce money's influence on access to health care, the Department of Health and Human Services is pricing it out of everyone's league, which is a rather predictable trick.
And the government's always existed to gobble your wallet into anemia. The listless class accepts IRS intrusions like they keep society from crashing and aren't an aggravating misunderstanding of who should get to determine the fate of wealth. As of now, we're choosing to stay warm by igniting it in trash cans, a strategy with potential long-term drawbacks.
Those sad souls who think they're being selfless by working for less should accept that paying income taxes is not a mere matter of tolerance. They are actually proud of our ludicrous tax code as if such disheartening compliance was a hallmark of civilization. But manners can only take you so far. You may as well thank someone who pushes you into traffic for the important lesson about road safety.
The assumption that the government makes the country go is a fundamentally misguided approach to American greatness. We do well despite it. The framework allows us to excel. By contrast, the ruling mentality is that municipalities paving roads made us who we are. And people won't make investments in worthwhile enterprises on their own unless we still permit something as unseemly as profits.
Americans aren't exactly frontiersman anymore, although there are plenty of urban centers with enough vacant storefronts to live out Wild West experiments. We now define rugged as skipping the prepared food islands at Whole Foods and cooking one's own chicken, with the toughest cowboys lining cooking sheets with foil on their own.
But toughness may be back in vogue, even if it only means you and not some commission is boss of your cushy life. Progressive dupes are realizing that bureaucracy inflicts severe punishments for the crime of engaging in commerce may mean that reality is finally mugging submissive mindlessness.
Uncooperative Americans can also discard the notion that present spending is the baseline, just like the high tax rate doesn't have to be 39 percent for perpetuity. This nation is supposed to be the sort of delightfully uncooperative place that sets new standards. With that in mind, we can reduce both the budget and taxes while declaring it's our measuring stick from this moment forward, especially if it means people get to spend more of their own damn earnings.
It's beyond time for Americans to proclaim they're not taking it like a bitch, which should be referred to as Amendment Zero. The whole point of being here is to not be pushed around, and many of our ancestors were smart enough to tell more oppressive jurisdictions to sod off. Regardless, the government will always do what it can to waste as much of a frightening percentage of our time as it does our incomes.
The only hope against it is that people are irritated enough to not accept it. On that hopeful note, enough of our fellow citizens may thankfully finally be sick of the hassle. Instead of stomping a face with a boot, Washington dominates by tapping shoulders a thousand times asking for involuntary donations or a request by force of law to comply with paperwork. We miserably and thankfully have just the president to push too far.
The meekness provoked by seeking comfort through decrees is enough to motivate people to be motivated. The only consolation until then is recalling that humans need frequent reminders in all things, particularly about the folly of exchanging autonomy for the phony joy of federally-promised comforts. The overwhelming annoyance that's looming may convince them that being stuck with straight pins all day outweighs the comforts of reclining.
Anthony Bialy is a writer and “Red Eye” conservative in New York City. Follow him at http://twitter.com/AnthonyBialy. Download a free ebook of his 2012 columns at https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/270599.
