THE COMING END OF AVOIDANCE AS AN OPTION

The Coming End of Avoidance as an Option...

This piece from Cato @ Liberty points to this document from DHS, outlining a study exploring the possibility of expanding the use of strip search machines to portable ones with the capability to be used anywhere.

Read this stuff.  It’s really…well, read it.

Of course, it seems they may be courteous enough to put up signs to inform you that you and your family is being observed via strip-search technology.  You may be given the chance to “opt out”.  How gracious of our would-be masters.  We all know where “opting-out” leads.

So, while there is an argument to be made by some that you can merely use avoidance to resist the TSA abuses present at airports, soon this type of abuse may be extended to anywhere a crowd gathers.  Professional sports venues are specifically mentioned (pg. 9), but it’s not a stretch by any means to think that this “suicide bomber prevention” technology could be expanded to include shopping malls, large stores, and anywhere else deemed to be “at risk”.  Indeed, once this technology is in place and in use, it could be used at will.  Technology already exists that allows for scanning you as you drive, from a vehicle.  See here, here, and here. After all, what are you gonna do about any of it? 

Where will avoidance get you when you cannot shop, go to a sports event, or even drive on your own streets without BigBrother’s gentle hands peeling off your and your family’s clothing?  What then, Patriot?  Where will avoidance get you when you or your spouse are called for mandatory jury duty, and must pass through a strip search machine / sexual assault station?  You see, avoidance is being incrementally taken off the table, folks.

The time is coming, soon, when avoidance will not be a valid means of resistance.  I plan on using it while I can, but it won’t always be this way.  Right now, avoidance, defiance, and endurance are three valid options.  Avoidance may soon be off the table, leaving one with defiance and endurance as options. 

Defiant citizens will be crushed. 

Those who endure with no plans to act to change the situation are not enduring, but submitting.  Don’t fool yourself.

We will, as a society, be forced to choose.  Will we allow this to become common and accepted, thereby normalized in the minds of our children and grandchildren?  Will we really sit there at the fireplace in future years telling our grandchildren about the days when one could walk about freely, without a government agent looking under your clothes from afar?  Are we willing to be a generation that trades our freedom, and that of future generations, for a false sense of security?

Or will we resist?  Will we be the generation that digs in our heels and says “enough!”?

Will we be the generation that pays the price for the zealous guarding of our liberties so that future ones may reap the benefits? Go read Bill's take here.  Kerodin's latest, which touches this subject, is here.

Standing for liberty in the face of government has never been, and will never be, cheap.  Often those who do are crushed and die penniless from the effort, so that future generations may reap the blessings of liberty.  More on that in a future post.

Make your choices now.  Don’t make them rashly when forced into a corner, if you can at all avoid it.  Make them now, so whatever future actions and decisions you take are guided by principle, not passion, by thought and reason, not fear and convenience.

Don’t think this is just about my desire to keep the government’s eyes off my body and those of my family.  This is about nothing less than the wholesale surrender of the rights we possess, as explained in the Fourth Amendment.  These rights were secured with blood, pain and suffering.

Real lives were lost to secure them.  Fathers, sons, brothers.  Real people died.  Not some impersonal "founding father" or "patriot" from a history book, but real men and boys.  Mothers went childless.  Wives were forced to raise their families without their husbands.  Children cried themselves to sleep at night after being told that daddy wouldn’t be coming back. 

And just as many families did this on the other side of the Atlantic, the families of those “just doing their jobs”, acting as the agents of tyranny although they may not have been evil, individually.

Fast forward to today, when we, their descendants, are giving away what they secured...for nothing.

Our blood has thinned, it seems.

Or has it?

Resist.