Drop the last year into the silent limbo of the past. Let it go, for it was imperfect, and thank God that it can go. - Brooks Atkinson
Change, as I have written many times before, is a good thing. This is not to say that all changes are good; rather, it means that it’s good for things to be able to change. A world without death is a world without growth; a world without decay is one without development. And a world where societies cannot descend into tyranny is one where new and better societies cannot be built. Far too many Westerners are so afraid of possibility of negative change that they eagerly abase themselves before anyone who (falsely) promises to protect them from it, and are willing to destroy their children’s ability to cope with reality by subjecting them to vain and perverse efforts to permanently lock them into a state of ignorance and immaturity. As I wrote in “With Folded Hands”:
In the ‘40s, the watchword was “victory”. In the ’60s, it was “freedom”. But by the ’90s, it had degenerated into “safety”. Americans once recognized that there are some things worth dying for; now we encase our children in bubble-wrap and cry like little girls at the slightest risk. Our great-grandparents dared unknown frontiers, while we sit in our playpens content to watch the world go by on television…People aren’t like this naturally; most of us are born with a yearning to explore the world, a zest for adventure and a thirst for knowledge, but these are ground out of children in factory schools, frightened out of them by “authorities” trying to create a race of docile, frightened sheep and squeezed out of them by overprotective parents who imagine “child traffickers” and “sexual predators” around every corner…
Every new prohibition, every new nanny-state ban, every war on free choice (and in recent years, even free speech) is justified by the same thing: Safety, the bloated parasite-goddess whom fools continue to worship despite her total inability to deliver on her promises. In the past, civilizations died in blood and fire; ours is slowly suffocating in billions of tons of cotton wool. Nor are the overlords satisfied with “protecting” us from real, if exaggerated dangers such as accidents, ill-health and crime; no, they also have to invent mythical dangers like “sex trafficking”, and will continue to do so until every possible human behavior is bound by laws and regulations, watched by the police and centrally-planned by politicians.
But the only thing which never changes is the fact that things change. What police/nanny states seek – total subjugation of all individuality and absolute control over all human activity – is not only undesirable, but impossible; it is no more possible to absolutely control humanity than it is to stop the flow of time itself. Furthermore, the very attempt must eventually destroy the government which makes it, like a machine pushed far beyond its design parameters. It’s already happening; growing numbers of young people reject the idea that “experts” and “authorities” either can or should direct their lives, and recognize both the so-called “left” and the so-called “right” as the statist charlatans they are. As the old “Baby Boomer” dinosaurs and their wishy-washy “Generation X” followers begin to die off, prohibitionist madness will begin to die with them. Just as restrictions on same-sex marriage are collapsing and restrictions on marijuana are starting to, so must all other restrictions on private, consensual behavior. Prior to a few centuries ago, almost nobody questioned that idea that one individual could own another; now that idea is universally rejected. And prior to a few decades ago, very few questioned that a collective could own an individual; now even the staunchest collectivists try to pretend that state control of individuals isn’t based in such ownership. The time is fast coming when collective ownership and control of individuals is as universally abhorrent to moral people as individual ownership and control of other individuals is now, and though most reading this are already too old to fully enjoy that world when it arrives, we can take comfort in the fact that our grandchildren are not.
