Where are we, again?

Remember how it used to be? Maybe not. I don't even think I do. I don't think I ever truly knew what it was like to be truly free. I don't think there are many people left that remember being free. How quickly we forget.

My dad sometimes tells stories about, when he was younger, going on a bus trip out of town with a Ruger 10/22 over his shoulder and nobody batted an eye. The thought amazed me. I now fully realize why it amazed me: we aren't free any more.

I see the reports of peaceful, truly peaceful protesters, respectable men and women, being shot with rubber bullets, being corralled into holding pens, being detained without charge, even after bowing to authority and getting a permit to protest. Is that freedom?

You can be detained for forty-eight hours without charge. Is that being free?

I see and hear about police checkpoints and roadblocks, where people's cars and persons are being stopped and searched without any cause whatsoever. Is this the freedom for which millions of soldiers over the years have fought, bled, suffered, and painfully died?

I see the central government, a legitimate entity, illegitimately overstepping its bounds into the states' and the people's affairs. Is this our hard won separation of power at work?

I am no revolutionary, not even in the way our country's founders were. I don't want anymore change, as "change" has now become a word repugnant to our Republic.

I don't feel that I can rightfully say I want my country back, as I don't think I was born in my country; I was born into some strange and terrifying mess; a mess that no one admits to making. A mess that many say is America, but I don't.

I don't know what it is, and I don't know what to call it, but it's not America. I know America, I've read about America since I was old enough to read, and friend, this ain't it.

I've read and studied its Constitution, its form of government, its very codes and principles, and I don't find them in use anywhere in this strange country.

This shape-shifting, formless mass of newly-set precedents of tyranny and immorality of Orwellian proportions is supposed to be a free country, America?

It would be insulting if someone said to me, "Why do you hate America?", because I love America. I don't believe that there is any other terrestrial place that I have ever admired more than America. It is the ignorant, backward thinking of "obedience to the Executive Office equals loving America" that has destroyed our Republic.

"America, right or wrong."

This is the most ridiculous phrase I've ever heard, because the true America never changes! America stands for the same principles as it did 100 years ago! I don't know when, but somewhere in time, someone convinced the masses that the erroneous men that are supposed to uphold the Constitution but never do (the men in government) and America are one in the same.

No, America doesn't change with administrations, because the standards of morality, law, and justice are the same, regardless of the times or the era in which one lives.

"There is no better country."

I agree, so why should we allow it to crumble into a pile of sawdust? If you love something, wouldn't you rabidly defend it? If you love this country, you should be personally defending its honor and principles in every respect, not smacking down those who would dare speak out against the status quo.

What a sickening thing that so many of our vets — your fathers, grandfathers, brothers, and cousins — died for something that has been taken with a stroke of tyrant's pen. You should be outraged. Instead, many are in a politically induced coma.

I am no revolutionary, I just love what was my country.

As a man once said, "If you think we're free today, you know nothing of tyranny and even less about Freedom."