Terrorists are Lurking!
Life, faculties, production – in other words, individuality, liberty, property – this is man. And in spite of the cunning of artful political leaders, these three gifts from God precede all human legislation, and are superior to it. Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place. Frederic Bastiat
Bastiat’s small book, The Law, starts with such simple logic that it transcends the conflicting situations of our modern world. In fact, I have considered refusing to discuss politics with anyone who has not read it. But then there are so many in our world who have opinions on everything but have read nothing. They are experts in everything, having watched the iconic news headlines and filtered it through their emotional bias, but have no ground of understand to support even the faintest logical sequence of thought.
Laws are made by people, sometimes by people who are passionately out of touch with reality. Take for example the question of what we should do to protect ourselves from terrorist attacks. Of course, terrorists exist and they lurk below the horizon of our attention, living among us until one day they expose their evil in an act of destruction designed to terrorize, to create attention and fear. The new is filled with these attacks across our world in almost all free nations. The question is, how do we handle them? What can we do to protect ourselves? And it is there, in this question that the problem exists. For the answers, all too often, miss the point.
Let me explain. As Bastiat proposes, before the law, man existed and we set about to take from the land that which we need to sustain ourselves and to accumulate possessions and wealth. But lurking in the shadows of the human family were those who thought it better to steal from those who worked than to work themselves. So, we began to accumulate laws and enforcers of the law to protect us.
The problem is, there are not enough enforcers to stand by everyone of us all the time. So, the evil of the terrorist has the advantage in planning and executing their acts of violence. Then comes the well-meaning but emotionally deprived do-gooders who propose that if the terrorists had no means to exact their evil there would not be a problem. Ah, great idea. Take away the clubs, knives and guns so that evil will not exist.
Is there a problem with this? Of course, there is. The evil is not in the means but in the perpetrator. Inanimate objects are not evil in and of themselves. People are the agents of evil. It is not an issue of controlling the means but of identifying the people and controlling them. So how do we do that? We have already decided how to do that. Our nation was founded on the principle that every person has the right and responsibility to protect themselves and their possessions. In that there are not enough police for everyone to have one, it is insufficient to call the police after the violence has occurred. The object is to stop the perpetration of violence. That can only be done when we have the means to do so individually and the understanding that we are the primary point of responsibility for our own safety and security.
Although this is a very simple logic, it is somehow lost in the complexity of our modern social structures. Whole nations have tried to deal with the evil of human depravity by dealing with the means of violence rather than with the violent themselves. Then we wonder who crime exists and why crime rates increase. Duh! Crime is present because opportunity exists and protection is absent. The police cannot and should not be expected to be, everywhere at once. The police cannot stop violence, they can only document it with reports and investigate it after the fact. So, if security and safety is the point, then personal responsibility is the primary means to it.
Let me cut to the point here. Get a gun and learn how to use it. Be prepared to protect yourself and your family. If the law will not permit it, change the law. It the local politicians do not like it, vote them out of office. Being politically correct is not the objective. Staying alive is. Those who do not understand this are co-conspirators with the violent which lurks in the shadows. That right! They empower the terror by refusing to acknowledge it and by deal with the means of violence rather than the cause of violence.
It was a shock to my idealistic young self when I entered police work now many years ago. I thought, or at least hoped, that everyone was sane, and wanted the best for themselves and everyone else. I though love and good will would prevail eventually because of human kindness. Then I hit the streets and discovered the axis of evil, the arena of satanic darkness. Evil exists. It does not exist because I do not care enough or because I do not love enough or because I am not good enough. It exists because it exists. It is a fact of the human experience. It lurks in the darkness of depravity and it coxed into active action by the intoxication of its surrounding controls and sanity. It exists because the evil one himself exists and because he exerts his hatred of God and man through human agents.
If you do not believe this, then you are stuck with the illusions of denial and the ignorance of human history. In his book, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, Erich Fromm catalogues the history of evil. To read this tomb of evil documentation may be depressing but it is reality.
To love and to care deeply may require that we protect that which we love with strength and fervent awareness. To deal with evil is not evil. To not do so, may be. Think about it. Then take action to protect yourself, your family and your community.
