Wesley Howe

While I am not planning to espouse any particular political position here, at least not today, I have been somewhat bemused at the worries being expressed elsewhere about militias and anger. My observation is that the anger is a normal reaction to the arrogant exercise of power that culminated in passage of the recent health care legislation, and a result of popular opinion being ignored to do so.

A substantial number of people do not want bad medicine shoved down their throat. The entire process reeked of backroom deals and a condescending attitude of lawmakers who explained away their insistence on moving against public opinion through a belief that they knew better what was needed than the electorate. Let them eat cake. So yes, people are upset.

Now it seems that some have come to the realization that there are more than enough guns, high-capacity magazines and ammunition in this country to make a war against the citizenry a difficult proposition. Yes, that is why the second amendment is there. Any dispassionate reading of the plain text reveals that the intention is that the citizenry is to be allowed to prepare themselves to resist tyranny, which can be defined as oppressive power exerted by government.

Those who recognize that the reason history repeats itself is that certain human behavior triggers reactionary human behavior should pause to remember the last time the government undertook major initiatives to squash dissension, they only triggered more. [Here I am referring to the series of events that ended in the Oklahoma City bombing].

While we haven’t seen the bullets flying like they did in Waco, or tanks being deployed against civilian structures, calmer heads should remember that specific, repressive actions undertaken by the government contribute to the growth of anti-governmental sentiment as surely as the rain contributes to the growth of flowers.

One has to wonder if the cycle of governmental attempts at repression is once again on a upswing. The suspicion that politics was behind the arrests of the “Hutaree” group is there, and any continuance of efforts to make more high-profile arrests will surely be followed by a greater level of resistance. A lack of parity in weaponry has never hindered resistance to oppression, for some examples look to the United States, France, Mexico, Cuba and most recently Kyrgyzstan to see how well received tyranny is.

The raw exercise of power in contravention of popular opinion runs counter to the spirit of our representative system, as described by Abraham Lincoln, in his Gettysburg Address, as a “…government of the people, by the people, for the people…“. Being a duly elected representative is no license to substitute personal opinions for public opinions.

While I do not hope for a resurgence in violence (or the repression which feeds it), I think there will be a revolution of sorts this Fall, at the polls. Some people just never seem to remember history, even when it was less that twenty years ago.