Brewer thank God our forefathers didn't care for their own skin as much as you do or we'd still be toasting the Queen before dinner. My guess is you have never in your life been to a third world hole where the average man would love to have the freedoms you apparently take for granted.
You will be left alone if you just make nice and comply? For the sake of my children's generation I urge you to read some history and really test your assertion against the stark and disturbing facts of the twentieth century. Im not being sarcastic here, I would seriously ask you to reconsider.
Principle matters and is worth dying for if we are to have the rule of law. Everyman must decide for himself when enough is enough and it is time to quit trying to hold government accountable within the system, and begin forcing accountability to the law by other means. Honest men can disagree on how bad things need to get before we must allow our fervent desire to live in peace to take a backseat to our demand for government to respect our God given liberties and follow the limits set down for it in the Constitution. I won't debate where that line exists, as two good Patriots can and will disagree on that.
What is not up for debate is that the line must exist somewhere or freedom is already lost or soon will be. A citizen who will not eventually use whatever means is necessary, including force, to uphold the rule of law is not a citizen at all. They are more properly called a subject or serf of the government official who IS willing to use force. If a man's freedom depends on the SELF RESTRAINT of any government, then that is no different at all than depending on the benevolence of a king. Though the man might enjoy peace for a time it will be fleeting, and his "rights" aren't rights at all, they are priveleges, subject to the continued benevolence of that king. Or dictator. Or dear leader. Or any other name given to men who rule by their own desires rather than rule of LAW.
We here in America have had the luxury of not contemplating these things for a long time, thank God. That said, we should make no mistake; this is a well trodden path and history is replete with examples of the sad fates of individuals and entire peoples whose futures were dependent on the kindness of kings and benevolence of government officials because they were unwilling to resist.
A man who would be free will decide where that line is, and stick to it whatever the cost. He may not win. In fact if he is first he will most certainly lose, and lose big. The signers of the Declaration of Independence endured tremendous personal loss that they never recouped. So have men in wars since who have defended our way of life at great, even crushing, personal loss.
These men, willing to risk everything for mere principle, are named Patriots. We cannot return to them what they have lost. We can only honor them by taking up their cause when liberty is again under threat, and ensure their sacrifice was not in vain by doing what they did, holding nothing back, and risking....everything.
Some closing thoughts by some principled men:
"The truth is, all might be free if they valued freedom, and defended it as they ought."
""If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen."
-Samuel Adams
"War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself."
- John Stuart Mill
And a warning from a man who made a mistake that put him and his people in the Gulag, and one of the saddest regrets in history:
"And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward."
-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
