Searching for Liberty... a reminder.

The Crypt Lake Hike..  is it "safe"?

When I first started this blog some time ago, before I wrote one word of comment, I had to decide on a name.

What would I call my little foray into the world of blogging journalism?

Quickly, I centred on "Searching for Liberty" - because, I suppose, my concerns with the political process in our country, and elsewhere, ultimately related to questions of liberty and freedom.

Not in the sense of some extremist conception of "libertarianism" where society is simply about survival of the fittest, but in the sense of seeing government as having as little role as reasonably possible in our lives, while still assuring a stable police and justice system, a functioning army, a solid educational system, and, in fact, a functioning public health program.

I am a supporter of basic safety nets - welfare if you will.  As I blogged last week, experience in Cuba makes it clear that crime rates have very little relationship to the way in which we deal with people after the fact and much more with how society deals with people before they turn to crime...  that may not play well with the hard-core conservative base - but it's a fact.

My sense of liberty is premised upon the Declaration of Independence in the United States:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

A citizen should have the right, and in fact, the obligation, to pursue their own happiness to the fullest of their ability - without interference or intrusion of the state. 

In my mind, for the state to seek to shackle or encumber the individual with burdens imposed by the state where that individual is not interfering with the liberty of another individual is not only wrong - it is immoral.

Why, then, do our politicians see themselves as being entitled, over and over again, to pass laws which expand and add to the authority of the state to control our day-to-day lives?  Why is it that Liberals feel it appropriate to push children into daycare almost immediately out of the womb, so that the government takes significant control over the raising of our children?  Why is it that our current Conservative government feels it appropriate to have authority to intrude on our privacy, to restrict the discretion of an alleged "independent" judiciary? 

In Alberta - we seek to pass laws to punish "almost impaired" drivers.  We establish a Maintenance Enforcement department who has draconian power to interfere with our citizens - and then go farther, and pepper the Maintenance Enforcement Act with protection from oversight by the Courts - so that when government mistakes are made (and they make a lot of them), there is very little re-dress or recourse for people who have been harmed by the heavy hand of the state?

Now - we read that suggestions are now being made that restaurant menus include detailed nutritional information, under threat of government sanction if they don't - because, apparently, we need to assume that our citizens are all mentally handicapped so must have every risk explained to them as if they were two years old.

Beyond that - the kicker is that as government expands their greasy reach into your life and mine - they send the bill for that pleasure to the same people who they abuse.

Thank-you, very much.

But.

Yet.

We shuffle along like sheep - kept in line by increasingly divisive partisanship and political rhetoric, so that as long as "our side" wins, we smile and nod - even as "our side" resumes imposing the strong arm of government upon us just as "the other side" did before.

Maybe it's time to say "enough".

Maybe it's time that more of us decided that liberty and freedom is more important that some myth of safety and security which will never come, no matter how much authority and power we give government to control us.

Maybe it's time we started looking at politicians not as our over-lords, but as our employees.  Doing only as much as we need, and no more.

The effort at the creation of a conservative or liberal utopia is not only pointless, it's dangerous.  As a lawyer, I can tell you, even in my relatively brief tenure, the expansion of laws passed in the last 26 years is truly breathtaking.. and not in a Niagara Falls, Grand Canyon sort of way.  Every time we have an election, regardless of the party elected, there appears to be some sense that they MUST pass new laws to show the electorate that they are "working for us".  Except they aren't.

Every single new law passed is a restriction on liberty.

Every time a new bill is proposed, we should understand, out of the gate, that our employee is telling us there is something new that we can't do.

Personally - I think society works pretty well at the moment.. if anything, there are certain government efforts that we should do without.  Is it perfect?  Nope.  But it never will be.  There will always be poor people, there will always be crime, there will always be pain and suffering.. and the effort to eradicate it is a fools effort.  Unless we, effectively, are asking the government to create a real "Matrix" where we are kept safe and fed in a myriad of liquid capsules as happy thoughts are passed through our brain.

And even then, eventually we're going to die anyway.  So even at that extreme, our "safety" is an illusion.

Because to live is to understand that we must die.

To be free is to understand the risk of failure, the risk of injury and harm.

For anyone who has ever stood atop a ski hill and pointed the boards down, for anyone who has hiked Crypt Lake in Waterton National Park, they understand that really being alive means you sometimes have to take a step out of your comfort zone. 

As Stephen King once wrote, "You can't be careful on a skateboard, man."

Think about it.

My wife and I at Crypt Lake..  being "alive"!