Left Alone

I am hearing more and more about people whose political philosophy seems to sprout fully armed from a single, simple principle: Leave Me Alone.

Such people often identify themselves as libertarians, a nice-sounding word – I mean, it has most of the word “liberty” in it.  How could that be bad?

Leave Me Alone is the battle cry of the tea baggers, of the militias, of the survivalists and of the forlorn and confused heartland.  Leave Me Alone is what the beaten dog of a kid whimpers to the schoolyard bullies.  Leave Me Alone is the moan of the beleaguered, the put-upon, the fucked-with.  It’s the impotent rage of those who hurt but don’t know why, like a bull tortured by thrusts from all sides in the blinding sunlight of the ring.

It’s Jeffersonian distrust of government – without the Jefferson part.

It’s anarchism without the intelligence.

It’s radical free-marketism and unfettered corporate license masquerading as something noble.

“I just want the government to leave me alone.”  Please leave me alone.  It’s a sentiment with a venerable pedigree.  This nation was indeed founded by people who came here to be left alone.

Europe was a pretty hard place to take in the late 17th and 18th centuries if you didn’t happen to belong to the right club.  Wrong social class, and you were dirt.  Wrong political party, and your future was bleak.  Wrong religion, and you and your family could be beaten and even killed.  There were many sources of power in the Old World, and it was easy to have no access whatsoever to any of them.  One’s life was very much in the hands of the church, the government, the moneybags, and the crown.  Murder, excommunication, prison, torture ... all quite common, especially for people with no “juice.”  The first American colonists could be forgiven for wanting to be left alone.

And then there’s the health care reform bill.

It must be conceded that at first blush it doesn’t seem quite as evil as murder, prison and torture.  Granted, it’s pretty bland, not the across-the-board reform of a corrupt institution that some of us were hoping for.  It’s mediocre, diluted, cowardly even.  But evil?  Is there really no good in it at all, compared with what we have now?  Is it really government messing with us in some deep-in-the-bone way that offends our every impulse toward freedom and individual autonomy?  

“I want to be left alone.” Garbo-esque, this.

First, do you really want to be left alone?  Really?  Have you thought through the actual consequences of being left alone in the way you describe?  Or are you just venting about your own feelings of powerlessness and fear in the face of a world changing around you?  If it’s the latter, then I’m with you, brother.  I’m not that good with change, either.  I’m still listening to Mitch Ryder & The Detroit Wheels.  Change makes me nervous, and sometimes it makes me cranky.  So, I get it.   But when you sound like you want to build a philosophy out of Leave Me Alone, when the rhetoric and rage get all fired up and the pontification starts up in earnest, then I start to have my doubts.

Because all the Leave Me Alone shit isn’t so consistent across the board, is it?  When the county construction crews come out and repair the roads and snow plows clear the driveways, I don’t hear much Leave Me Alone.  When the EPA didn’t do shit during the Bush years to enforce Superfund cleanup mandates, and children died from cancer from the toxic runoff of unregulated polluters, I didn’t hear their parents say, “You know, it’s sad that our kid is dead, but I’m really glad the government left us alone.”  When a murderer is apprehended, when a child abuser is arrested, when corporate scumbags are led away by U.S. Marshalls, only the crackpots among us say, “God, I just wish those nasty government people would leave everyone alone.”

The truth is that having a government is constantly disappointing.  And the reason is that government is really just a bunch of people we hired to do the shit we didn’t want to do ourselves.  Do you want to build roads, and predict the weather, and fool with the interest rates and negotiate with North Korea?  Well. no one does, so we hired some people to do it, and then we got lazy and stopped keeping an eye on them, and they took over, like the machines in the Terminator movies.  It’s our fault; there’s no use being pissed off about it and blaming the government.  They do what we tell them to and what we let them do.  If we weren’t so drugged by TV and Rush Limbaugh and hate and anger, we might actually start thinking some serious thoughts about how to change things.  Not by holing up in compounds with automatic weapons and explosives – which is more or less how an 8-year-old would respond to a problem – and not by spitting on blacks and gay people and whoever else happens to be handy, but by actually changing the way we live, changing our own behavior and the way we relate to government.

No matter how you may feel about it, America was never supposed to be a poster child for social Darwinism.  We’re supposed to try to take care of people who are in trouble.  And as much as the mean-spirited paranoiac in our black little hearts may tell us otherwise, most of the people who need our help aren’t shiftless, lazy bastards who brought their woes on themselves.  No money for social programs, you chant?  But if you don’t care about the fact that our tax dollars have gone for napalm and Star Wars, CIA assassins, the overthrow of democratically elected leaders, and supplying weapons to Al-Qaeda for years, then how can you justify complaining about paying for environmental regulations and health care reform?  It’s a whine with a hollow ring to it.

Over 4,000 Americans have died in Iraq since 2003, and over 1,000 in Afghanistan since 2001.  About 100,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed since 2003.  100,000 people!  And for nothing.  Absolutely nothing.  No weapons of mass destruction, no reasonable justification for invading another country pre-emptively.  All lies, all just a hateful ideology on the part of people who would never have to fight in the war, and neither would their children.

Where was all the rage then?  You have these spitting, sputtering, apoplectic white people foaming at the mouth over the health care reform bill, which has yet to take a single life, and promises to actually save quite a few.  And the grand philosophical position trotted out to justify this rude, unintelligent and ignorant behavior?  

They need to leave us alone.

I have a news flash for you, buddy.  You are not alone, and you never will be.  You're a citizen of this country, and you are bound together with other citizens in a common enterprise.  You profit from your membership in this community, in ways you probably don't even realize.  You're a part of this, whether you like it or not.

If you want to get yourself with a mob and chug some Bud and shriek, no one’s stopping you.  Not me, not the government you claim is determined to mess with you, nobody.  But please.  Spare the rest of the us this embarrassingly hypocritical attempt at justifying your bile and violence with a philosophy.  You weren’t there when government was really messing with real people’s lives.  You haven’t gotten off your couch and turned off the reality TV shows long enough to think up a way to make a positive contribution to real change in this country.  So please: sit down, and shut the fuck up.