Hello. My name is Tom White, and I am a Social Security and Medicare junkie. I am powerless over the funds that arrive monthly at my bank from Faceless Bureaucrats in D.C. and powerless over the bills my many eager doctors send to D.C. to get paid.
I should sign off on all that, but I can't. I am fatally hooked. To beg I am too proud, to do hard work I am too old. So I hold onto my stipend like all the rest of us aging millions who have permitted the state that rules us to rob us over all our lives with its ruinous taxes, delude us with promises of everloving care, wage wars against our interests, destroy our children's inheritance in the land our forefathers built, and not incidentally engage in such enormities as sending huge helicopters aboard even huger cargo planes back and forth from D.C. to Crawford, Texas so that the president won't have to take the tedious (and perhaps dangerous?) car ride from the airport to his ranch. Etc.
I admit to spiritual cowardice. I say that I trust in the Lord. The reality is that I trust in the government's checks. I am an addict of government money, money stolen from my fellow citizens, just as Gary North put the case in his May 12 article on LRC, "The Most Dangerous Addiction," about addicts and recovery programs.
I have rich friends and relatives my age who also say they trust in the Lord but who trust, really, in the same government fiat currency, worth now a small fraction, a tenth or less, of what it was worth when we entered the scene. I think the rationale I mostly use to calm my nerves and my unquiet conscience is to say that for the moment this is how the Lord is provisioning me, along with some earnings from work I can still do and have been lucky enough to get.
But I have in my inner vision a possibility that the whole mad scheme will blow up – must blow up at some point. Then we really will be trusting in the Lord if we are up to anything at all. There were no guarantees of survival or success for the Christians confronting lions and tigers in the Roman Coliseum. Nor for Joan at the stake. Least of all for Our Lord himself at the end. But there is every evidence that if we will trust, finally, all will be well. We have to go through this ordeal at some point to find out. At death if not before.
And perhaps out of whatever whirlwind of chaos and change a collapse might bring, the flower of Freedom (meaning true and Godly statelessness, as outlined by Lew Rockwell in his column, "The Inherent Instability of the State"), can be plucked from the nettle Imperial Madness. That our children's children may be free!
Imperial madness indeed. A great Russian writer once said that there are, basically, just two kinds of religion. One is the "original religion of mankind," in which God sacrifices himself for men. Its great symbol is the cross. The other is its obverse, the religion of war and theft and oppression in which men are sacrificed to gods, gods that powerful men make for themselves, icons of their own greed and cruelty.
It is always and everywhere the mad few against the peaceful and fair-minded many. The thieves against the honest men. The slick liars against the plain truth tellers. The power-seekers against the people who care about family, community, and religion. It is officiousness against simplicity. It is the engrossers against the generous.
Whatever form it takes, the blow-up that is certainly coming – although one does not know when – may be awfully ugly and is sure to be awfully hard; but it may bring at last, into our distressingly rigid, locked-up situation, the opportunity for real change. For that reason, let us not fear it but trust in the Lord.
May 13, 2003
