Just before Moses died, he told the people of Israel that they will go into the promised land and begin to sin against God. After a generation of wandering in the desert, mostly as a result of Israel’s rebellion, you would think he would be more optimistic about his people. I mean, they should have know exactly what happens when you screw around and disobey God. You end up being swallowed whole by the Earth or bitten by a poisonous snake or burned alive.
Still, Moses did not believe that the people would continue their obedience even though they did a pretty good job for the past 40 years or so. Moses knew that once he died, the people of Israel would begin to turn their backs on God as the next generation became further from the last one. He did his best and demonstrated to Israel the proper way to live and, more importantly, how deep our separation was with God because of our sin.
But was he just being overly pessimistic? I mean, he did accurately predict Israel’s downfall centuries before it happened. But he did not know it. He was merely speculating at the time. I think that Moses was not being pessimistic, but merely using his wisdom and insight into human behavior to give a stern warning to the Israelites.
This is why I may come off as pessimistic but I never really regard myself as a pessimistic person. I am merely applying the wisdom God has given me against the practical forms of human nature. Despite being around for only 27 years, I have seen enough of a pattern in human nature to understand that humanity is always going to be the collective simple fools we have been in our long history of idiocy.
The truth is, nobody wants freedom, just security. That is why Statism is able to run rampant in our government and totally shred the meaning of the Constitution. Freedom is hard to achieve and much harder to maintain. You have to be vigilant and make sure that you police your own behavior. And human beings are never good at that to begin with. After all, if we were, there would not be so many murders, lies, thefts, and so many other wonderful things that seem to plague us.
The ideologue Statists think that they have the answer to our problems: more government. With more and more government, people are less likely to commit those crimes. Unfortunately, government is run by fellow human beings, only now that they wield power, they are even bigger assholes then the rest of us. Have you honestly ever met an efficient bureaucrat? How about a reasonable one? You see, once human beings obtain any kind of power over another individual, they become complete and utter tyrants. It could be the Post Office clerk, the traffic cop, or the public school teacher. Any one of them can make your life miserable just because they want to.
The sad thing is, in America, we are so use to being told that we have freedom, we cannot recognize tyranny until something big is attempted, like government-run healthcare. So we accept these little annoyances and tell our children that this is just the way it is and some things will never change. And eventually we start to alienate those who refuse to accept the normal course of business as acceptable behavior. I have yet to hear a politician, besides Ron Paul and a few others, speak about the need for smaller government. Instead, a “conservative” is a Republican who happens to be pro-choice and against raising taxes.
So, despite my best efforts and the efforts of many others, I doubt we will ever see a government that will devote itself to shrinking rather than growing. Like The Elder from the Legacy of Kain series, it only seems to grow as everything else around it decays. It has ensnared many of us on its wheel of life and refuses to give us even many small freedoms like the freedom to smoke ourselves brainless.
My only conclusion for all this is that people want tyranny. They want tyrants to make the decisions for them because they are too cowardly to make any kind of major decision for themselves. Even conservatives see cuts in military spending as someone anti-conservative when our modern military budget makes Rome’s look like a militia in comparison. No one really wants smaller government, because they want someone else to solve their problems for them. Or, at the very least, to solve other people’s problems for them so they do not have to deal with the downtrodden as Moses and Jesus commanded us to do.
I would like to think that we are coming to turning point in America, but since most people do not seem to grasp even these simple truths and rejected Ron Paul solely because he dared to ask us to tone down our military, I do not see a more conservative nation in the future. Only more oppression and tyranny. We are a doomed country and I doubt that it will survive this century. The best we can do is to maintain as much freedom on our own and be ready to rebuild once it all comes collapsing down.