Nip It In The Bud

Ever use that phrase?  Know where it comes from?  So many of our cliches in life come from agrarian sources.

This phrase speaks to stopping the growth of something you don't find desirable.  I used to grow a lot of roses in Florida, and I took great care doing it.  It involves an almost constant pruning to produce nice long stems and big showy blossoms.  You nip a lot of small buds in order to get nice ones where you want them.

When it comes to weeds, anybody trying to grow nice stuff knows the difficulty of controlling weeds if you don't take precautions early on.  The trick to keeping yourself from being frustrated to death by out-of-control weeds is to not let them get started in the first place.

This post was prompted by a post written by Oleg Volk.  It's very short and worth the read, but it made me realize that we need to deal with how the problem arises in the first place.

Losing your personal and individual liberties is very much like the weed problem.  With the exception of the military, collective punishment has no place in a free society.  In the military, the teamwork necessary to survival in battle is ingrained by both collective reward and punishment.  But in the civilian population of a country based on freedom and rule of law that protects individual rights, collective anything is a very bad idea.

As a society, we've allowed the weeds of collective punishment to permeate our lives.  It mostly starts in the government schools (nothing public about them).  Children are taught to conform early on to all kinds of standardization and individuality and talent is not only not nurtured, it can be downright squashed.

It starts there and then it migrates in society to all levels and age groups.  I would never live in a neighborhood that has "Deed Restrictions"  or "Covenants."  You can do it if you want to, but you better pay close attention to all the fine print in that 200 page contract that will attract the nosiest busybody who really will pay attention to what kind of patio furniture you have, what color you paint the house, and what brand of trash receptacle you use.

We teach our children that if you excel, you are hurting the self-esteem of someone else, so don't excel.  We let the world, media, television, the indoctrination centers (school) tell our kids that we should all have the same stuff, and that if someone else has more, he must have gotten it because he's greedy and evil, not because he worked hard and provided other people with things that they needed or wanted and was thus rewarded for his effort.  Children are treated like idiots when they are allowed to play soccer, so long as they don't keep score.  Little boys can't possibly be allowed to be little boys and trained to control their energy and enthusiasm without the use of drugs.  No.  They must have some mythical condition called ADD or ADHD, which never existed until the late 20th century and doesn't exist anyplace but the U.S.

Not everyone who reads this will feel the same way I do.  I know that there are plenty of people out there that will go along with the collective ideas like sheep or lemmings, simply because it makes them feel safe.  Not one shred of real thought goes into it.  It's all based on feelings.  They can see a guy with a gun on his hip out in public and just start freaking out.  But if they see a uniform, a radio, a handcuff holster and twin magazine holsters holding an additional thirty rounds of ammunition, that's okay.  Never mind that the person with the gun is still a human being,  or that cops have gone to prison before for murder.  But I digress.

We need to fight this collective indoctrination at every turn.  This is why I hate unions so much.  Unions are for losers who don't want to excel.  They want to hide in the anonymity of a large group and just get by with doing enough to be passable or less.  It is absolutely criminal that anyone working for taxpayer money has anything remotely like collective bargaining.  Of course the only thing that is going to bring that to an end now will be the financial collapse of all the government entities that allowed it to go on.

It's one thing for the teacher to not allow gum chewing in class because it interferes with the child's ability to speak clearly.  It is quite another to not allow it because a few children were irresponsible and stuck their wad under the desk.  That teaches the child that a few bad people can just mess it up for the majority.

We live in such an upside-down world.  We subsidize those who choose to do nothing to improve their own situation.  We punish those who seek to be the best that they can be.  Then the media laud and celebrate those who denigrate the values of those who made the right choices and champion the so-called "rights" of the dregs of society to demand the fruits of the labor of the productive.

Whenever individual problems are dealt with by collective means, the result is loss of freedom.  From chewing gum to alcohol or drugs and even guns.  The founding fathers were right.  The government that governs best, governs least.