The Smallest Minority turns 5 today. Five years ago, Wednesday May 14, 2003, I put up three posts; one of which was “What is a Right?”
Interestingly, we’re still discussing that topic.
This will be my 2,936th post, an average of about 1.6 posts per day. Two years ago I was at post 2,117. (Obviously I’ve either slowed down, or I’ve made up for a decrease in quantity for an increase in quality length.) Sitemeter says the current visit count is 1,089,044 as I write this. Two years ago it was 557,464. Haloscan tells me that I have 14, 374 comments, up from “over 10,000” as I recorded it a couple of years back. (Apparently y’all have gotten much quieter!)
On the first anniversary of this blog, I posted 40 Things About Me and This Blog. I just re-read it.
Nothing much has changed except I’m older, I’m no longer Pistol Director at the Tucson Rifle Club and I don’t run the IHMSA matches there anymore, my grandkids are four years older (and STILL living with me), and I’ve read a lot more books.
I’m still arguing with people, and trying to educate both myself and others. Over the last five years I’ve watched as the defenders of the right to arms have grown stronger and more active, and I’ve watched as those who want the State to provide cradle-to-grave “care” have, too. They don’t see it like that, but it’s what it boils down to in the end. Over the last five years I’ve watched our military fight enemies armed with small-arms, crew-served weapons and IEDs (some of which are made in Iran), and enemies who control the checkbooks that pay, feed, and supply them. I’ve watched our political masters on both sides of the aisle behave like angry children. (It was Heinlein who said that “civil servant” is the semantic equivalent of “civil MASTER”.) I’ve watched the Supreme Court make decisions that, as Antonin Scalia has noted, create a Constitution for a country I don’t recognize. I’ve watched as the Chief Executive has spent money like water, and asked the people to just keep shopping! while doing dick-all about our porous borders. Yeah. That’s sustainable.
And now we’re at a point, politically, where there are three candidates running who have a realistic shot at the Presidency, and I wouldn’t urinate on any of them if their hair was on fire.
Where the hell is the space colony they promised me when I was a child, watching men leave bootprints and tire tracks in the lunar dust? Where is my new frontier, my place to go to so that I may live free? (I mean, I appreciate Scaled Composites and its competitors, but we should be living up there now, not floating around in low-Earth orbit in a tin can.)
Oh. Yeah. NASA. Right.
We’re headed for the nanny-state. We’re voting for it. I’ve been watching the petri-dish of Western Civilization that is the UK, and that’s the direction we’re headed, once they figure out here how to disarm the few of us who really mean it when we say we don’t want to live like that. (You can almost hear the gnashing of teeth over the Founders putting the Second Amendment in the Bill of Rights.)
Five years. That’s a lot of words. And mostly it’s been an exercise in trying to teach the horse to sing.
But I’m not quite ready to give up. After all, SCOTUS hasn’t handed down it’s decision in D.C. v Heller yet!
Here’s to one more year.
