government vs freedom

 When I was a young lad in 10^th grade high school I had a course on comparative governments or some such thing. During the class we discussed Socialism, Communism, Capitalism, Fascism, etc. You get the idea. Back in those days we lived in a state of relative innocence. It was the pre-Vietnam era and life was good. Our studies in “isms” proved that Americans lived under the most benign form of government on the planet (which I am sure was the initial goal). But, I found myself in hot water with the teacher when he saw on the cover on my notebook  a statement that read: “all government is a necessary evil.” I believed it then and I believe it even more today. So what was my problem with governments?

I am a firm believer that actions have consequences and words have meaning. The concepts of Freedom and Government are mutually exclusive! Either you are free, or you are governed. It is a case of “either or,” they are not compatible. People willingly sacrifice some freedoms for some safety or protection. Once you have lifted the lid of Pandora’s box looking for protection many adverse things crawl out. Just as there are no boundaries to freedom, pure freedom, there are no boundaries to government once it has been unleashed. Government is like a flesh-eating virus, once it gets into your system there is virtually no ridding yourself of it. During the Vietnam War over 35,000 American men and women died providing safety to the rest of America. Safety from attack by whom? Most of them were forced into military service, to travel abroad to a foreign country and overthrow the government there. In the process of making Vietnam safe we killed tens of thousands of the Vietnamese people. We were there to set them free from Communism, whether they liked it or not, no matter how many we had to kill.

The vast majority of our service men and women acted honorably and did their duty. Our government lied to us about why we were there and then escalated the war because of a false flag operation known as the Gulf of Tonkin. “On August 7, 1964, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, authorizing President Johnson to take any measures he believed were necessary to retaliate and to promote the maintenance of international peace and security in southeast Asia.” It was over 40 years later that we learned the “attack” on our spy boats never happened, we were duped by our own government. What could be more evil than to force young men and women to travel against their will to a foreign country to kill the people of that country, to possibly be maimed or killed themselves, all under false pretenses?  https://history.state.gov/milestones/1961-1968/gulf-of-tonkin

Now that generation is in their 60s and the same government has labeled them potential terrorists and tried to strip them of their rights to own firearms. In many states the same type of guns they carried in Vietnam, to kill or make “safe,” the Vietnamese people, have been made illegal to own. We, who were conscripted to make the world safe for Democracy, are no longer safe in our own nation, in our own corrupted “democracy.” Still wonder why I wrote what I did on my high school notebook cover?