The following is from an September-October, 2020 “Washington Monthly” article by Elizabeth Austin reviewing the book, “A Libertarian Walks Into A Bear” [Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling} “But today more than ever, there is nothing remotely amusing about a group of wrong-headed extremists plotting to take over a government and impose its own dangerously eccentric views on an unwitting and unprepared majority…With the story of Grafton, Hongoltz-Hetling was handed an American character in an ant farm. This New England hamlet twines together the most significant strands in our history: tax aversion, religious fervor, veneration of individual liberty, and a deep vein of cantankerousness. All counterbalanced by our equally powerful belief we are on a God-given mission to establish on this continent a shining City on the Hill. In Grafton, we find a microcosm of the constant American tension between “Don’t Tread on Me” and “E Pluribus Unum.”
………In the Grafton experience, we see clearly the chaos that can be created when a significant chunk of the community rejects the strictures of government, science, and the notion of community itself.
As i write this, more than l59,000 American lives have been sacrificed to failures of government at almost every level, and to the refusal of millions of Americans to curtail their sense of personal liberty and submit to relatively brief inconvenience to protect their neighbors and their communities……
This is what happens when massively funded propaganda campaigns lead large numbers of Americans to lose faith in our system of government. This is what happens when that loss of faith leads to blind opposition to taxation. This is what happens when public services and public infrastructure are systematically starved of resources in the name of “fiscal responsibility.” And this is what happens, shamefully, when those who are best able to recognize the threat and sound the alarm choose instead to treat local politics like some sort of low-stakes sporting event for out-of-shape people.
Today, we are all living in Grafton. Armies of rabid bears are wandering our streets….terrified, we beg our neighbors for help, only to be told the Lord will protect us, or that the cataclysm in the streets is just punishment for our moral failures or our political misdeeds.
And all of this is happening because a large disgruntled minority of Americans dutifully memorized the Declaration’s listing of our unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness without perceiving that these rights can exist only within the context of the social contract – an Enlightenment concept so deeply familiar to the Founding Fathers that, tragically, they didn’t consider it necessary to mention……..
We are separated today..because millions of my fellow Americans have been unwilling to sacrifice even a shred of their perceived personal liberty to the higher considerations of what we owe to each other.
With Justice For All 