With all due respect to my friends on the Team Liberty cultural revolutionary committee, I bristle at the thought of being known as an activist. To me, activism brings to mind visions of the mentally impaired - banner wavers who flop down before the treads of oncoming trucks in the interest of animal rights or who slather their naked bodies with ketchup and play dead in protest of some ever-unspecified aspect of free trade. The idea of lifting a torch and leading the victimized masses (I hate the masses and I generally don't give a damn when they get victimized) up the hill to the Evil Oppressor's Castle is unfathomable and queer to my very nature.
I do admit that Kennedy and I are not very good team players. It's a good thing that we run this operation from 3000 miles apart, or else we'd constantly find ourselves at each others throats and never get a thing done with it. Well, actually I'm looking forward to my impending move to the Nutmeg State, even if the face time takes a toll on my business relationship with the No Treason staff out there. Even so, I'm dead serious about my shortcomings as a team player.
It became such an item of contention that the editors of No Treason have been, in the fashion of a chi-com late night critiquing session, dragged from our virtual beds and carted into a room full of clucking tongues, wagging fingers, and chants of "shame, shame" for not doing enough for libertarian causes. We were admonished to get off our backsides and get ourselves active in a real and tangible libertarian cause rather than just kvetching and whining on a website about the state of things.
"You could show more outrage," we were told, but as my co-editor, aptly puts it in "The Revolution Will be All Business," there is no Ghandian struggle, no mob, no movement that can accomplish what an average individual minding his own business can do when he seriously takes up the affair of quietly moving his own financial resources outside the reach of the pilferers and takes charge of the manner in which he governs his private life without regard to the sanction of the state or the state's minions.
If it's been months since you read Dick Freely's article, "Do Something!" take another look at it to see what I'm talking about. Well before Freely ever penned his timeless offering on personal liberty, I chose that very route. It amounts to more than just a knock-off piece of irreverent humor. It's my emphatic opinion, that therein lies the brightest potential for individualism and it goes miles above and beyond the implications that any free state project or any annual tête à tête of think tankers can bring to the board.
That's not to say that such concerted and collective enterprises have no value, but much like the trip to the moon, they have more to offer in the journey and the development of the mission than in what awaits at the targeted destination. Such efforts yield limited return and barely go beyond that which can be achieved via the use of informal networking systems that are now available to individuals - average joes across the continent from Moclips to Magog with access to a phone and modem.
This is why I won't hang my hopes for liberty on any activist or collective endeavor and neither will I rely upon others to blow a hole in the side of the cattle car so that I may escape it. There will be no Moses for libertarians. No Anti-Marx. No promised land of freedom, except for the one I make for myself and my own. I've already taken foot bail without the leave of Pharaoh and I won't look back in outrage for those who choose to stay within the porous walls of a city which cannot hold them.
