Happy What?
by L. Neil Smith
[email protected]

Special to TLE

It would be remiss of me not to wish everyone I regularly communicate with as happy an Independence Day as they can have. However—as I observed in one of my earliest books—what the hell is there left to celebrate?

Certainly not the fact that when we go out in public— and especially when we fly on a plane—we are forced not to provide ourselves with that one item proven to ensure our safety, the only thing that could have prevented the September 11th atrocity, the personal sidearm. Maybe some of us can celebrate the fact that it's possible to beg our masters for their permission to do so, as long as they get to sodomize our rights first.

Certainly not the fact that the traditional means of celebrating the beginning of our independence from European thinking—fireworks— have become a vitual monopoly of our masters and their corporate collaboraters.

Certainly not the fact that every second of our lives, every breath we take, wherever we go and whatever we do there, is being monitored by our masters, and that every day their corporate collaboraters invent new ways to deprive us of a right to privacy they grandly inform us does not exist.

Certainly not the fact that our masters siphon off 7/8 of our productive capacity and use it to build themselves palaces, arm themselves with weapons they forbid us, and take their mistresses on long rides in limousines so they can sneer at their serfs through tinted windows. What was it Maria Muldaur sang about "the owners ate the cane and the workers ate the weeds"?

Certainly not the fact that our masters have a federal agency—NASA— dedicated to keeping us slaves right here on the Global Plantation, trapped on this planet, while pretending to explore outer space.

So I will spend Independence Day with my family, as I always have. My mother Marie will fix a big meal, all our relatives will be there. We'll think about my dad, dead now for 11 years. A few smelly "snakes" will get burned along with a box or two of sparklers, while everybody waits for the cops to show up—on a day when I ought to be firing my combat 12-gauge or one of my .44 Magnums into the air as much as I can afford. But of course if I actually do that, our masters will send their thugs to come to get me and I probably won't write too much more of this kind of thing.

This holiday coincides, more or less, with the 20th anniversary of my marriage to Cathy L. Z. Smith. That relationship, and the existence of our daughter, Rylla, has afforded me more pleasure, pride, and comfort than I can articulate here and now. In a world gleefully throwing itself into a fascist meatgrinder, where all of my work of the last 40 years— literary and political—seems futile, because humanity is more profoundly enslaved now than when I started, sometimes the love of my family and the presence of my friends is the only real compensation I can rely on.

I think I'm about ready to abandon this holiday to the jackals that have stolen it from us, and focus on December 15, the day the Bill of Rights was ratified, instead. That would certainly send a message to the thieves, rapists, and murderers who fondly imagine they've been freely selected by people who want them, or who believe they've been hired by a lawful process. It's entertaining to imagine what this city government, or any other, would do to try and celebrate a holiday that calls, effectively, for an end to their existence and possibly their incarceration, too.

That's what I'll be thinking about this July 4th as listen to the collectivist fireworks from my mother's back yard, how to celebrate Bill of Rights Day without the left wing and right wing collectivists taking it away. The best way, I think, is to make it something they won't want to touch.

I hope you'll think about that, too. If that doesn't appeal, go see the new Charlie's Angels movie. We loved it, and it was a relief to forget Homeland Security and the USA Patriot Act for a couple of hours.

I like Lucy Liu best, but that's just me.

Three-time Prometheus Award-winner L. Neil Smith is the author of 23 books, including The American Zone, Forge of the Elders, Pallas, The Probability Broach, Hope (with Aaron Zelman), and his collection of articles and speeches, Lever Action, all of which may be purchased through his website "The Webley Page" at http://www.lneilsmith.org. Autographed copies may be had from the author at [email protected].

L. Neil Smith writes regular columns for The Libertarian Enterprise www.webleyweb.com/tle, Sierra Times www.sierratimes.com, and for Rational Review www.rationalreview.com.

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