EjectEjectEject: On Individual Responsibility

I just finished reading an excellent, lengthy essay by Bill Whittle, on the topic of individual responsibility. If I get permission from him, I will reprint it here. If you plan on reading it, you need to allocate probably about an hour (for a reasonably speedy reader) to get through the essay and all the comments. Quotes follow, not necessarily in order in the essay (emphasis mine):

“They, like me, call themselves conservatives, but we are indeed a new breed: pro-choice, pro-gay, vigorous defenders of equality of race, religion, gender and sexual orientation. We’re big on freedom and big on responsibility. The left hates us. We are harder to attack than the racist, homophobic, misogynists that they formerly could comfortably lambaste as right-wingers … Today’s politics are more like a Rubik’s cube, where someone you may stand shoulder-to-shoulder with on one subject, can become, with a simple twist of the issues, a bitter opponent in some other fight.”

“Individual responsibility frees us from our past, from the fate of our birth, from the millennia of class and caste and of failed ideas that have kept so many in bondage for so long. If we indeed do have the ability to control our own selves, then we can free our own minds from the river of history and experience.”

“There were some major problems with Frontier Justice: it was brutal, it was often error prone, and once made those errors could not be corrected by cutting down the offender, apologizing, and sending him on his way. But Frontier Justice did have one immeasurably attractive virtue. It understood, in a way we are rapidly forgetting, the difference between perpetrator and victim. It realized that the former started into motion a chain of events, and that all of the consequences could therefore be laid at the feet of the individual person committing the crime … Give your responsibility to the group, and you give your freedom to the group. Freedom without responsibility becomes, very rapidly, a farce. When laws become farcical, the result is anarchy. Anarchy is unacceptable, so measures are taken to reduce freedom and increase controls on the population. That is precisely what is happening at full gallop.“

(Pardon my censoring of this excerpt; go read the original essay if you want the full effect. And yes, I catch the irony of this statement. -MPB)
“To those who want to limit speech they see as hateful, I can only utter these simple words of protest: Go straight to —-ing hell you miserable authoritarian —–uckers! Forgive me, I know that offended some of you. But remember this: words are words. They are encapsulated ideas, and the only harm they can do us is the harm we ourselves allow them to do us … The defense against hate speech is not to put our hands over our ears, our eyes, and someone else’s mouth. The way to fight this human virus is to do what we have been doing: hold those who use such language up to ridicule and scorn, to use our own words as a people blessed with freedom of speech, and to let such archaic and diseased notions and epithets die a quick death in the marketplace of better ideas.”

“I promised I would tell you who is responsible for the mess we find ourselves in.

Proceed into your bathroom and take a long, hard look in the mirror.

I also promised to tell you who can get us out of this fix. Well, keep looking. While you’re looking, make a decision.”

Essays like these remind me that freedom of speech is alive and well in the U.S.A., and to fail to exercise it is to participate in its destruction.