The Cost of Feeling Safe

You’ve heard me rant before about the police state we’ve created, about what I call the loss of American freedom. Some might phrase it differently: the trade of liberty for the illusion of safety. But no matter how you frame it, the result’s the same — we’re buying comfort with freedom as the currency.

Old George Washington and the boys fought a war because British soldiers were stopping people in the street for assembling, for speaking, for daring to dream of revolution. They built protections against that kind of tyranny into the Bill of Rights — the first Congress saying, “Never again.”

And yet here we are. Go through the rights one by one, and you’ll see we’ve already sold most of them off. Because when you shackle actions, behaviors, and even thoughts with endless restrictions, liberty becomes collateral damage.

Most people don’t even realize it — that when they argue for more police, for more enforcement, for the state to “do more,” they’re actually arguing against liberty.

Our founders envisioned a land where every person could defend themselves, their families, their property, and their very way of fucking life — using whatever means were available. Guns, blades, grit — whatever it took to resist oppression. That was the point.

It wasn’t about protecting people from danger or cushioning them from failure. If you design a government with those goals in mind, you don’t get a republic. You get socialism. Or something damn close.

So when you go crying to your city council about an unsafe intersection or demand more patrols in your neighborhood, you’re not just asking for help, you’re signing away freedom. You’re saying, “Take a little more control over my life so I can feel warm, safe, and cuddly.”

But at what fucking cost?

Police can set up DUI checkpoints — but they’re not just looking for drunk drivers, are they? They’re checking registrations, licenses, destinations. In other words, they’re invading privacy. Border Patrol doesn’t just patrol the border — they operate fifty, a hundred miles inland. Because apparently, doing their job at the border isn’t enough.

That’s how I found myself south of Alamogordo, getting stopped and asked, “Where you headed? What’s your purpose? Where you been?”
Translation: We don’t trust you to be free.

If they suspect you of anything — anything — they can detain you, strip your car, strip your person, and violate your goddamn privacy under the banner of “public safety”.

Here’s the kicker. The U.S. military — you know, the force we use to police the world — has about 1.3 million active-duty service members. The United States, with its 8 billion neighbors and 195 countries, decided that was enough to protect democracy abroad.

Meanwhile, here at home? We have over 900,000 sworn law enforcement officers. Almost a one-to-one ratio with our entire military.

Let that sink in.

We have nearly as many cops policing us as we have soldiers policing the world.

That should scare the ever-loving shit out of people.

We don’t have free speech, not when permits are required to protest. We don’t have freedom of the press, not when you need a business license to sell a publication. You can’t even own property if your taxes lapse, because the same system that preaches freedom will seize your land to fund the cops who enforce it.

Half of you think disarming America will fix it — it fucking won’t.

The Fourth Amendment? Gutted.

A “speedy trial”? Please. Justice moves at the pace of bureaucracy now.

And maybe I’m saying all this because it should scare people. It should make us angry.

We should want to take the country back — take our streets back — and start solving our own fucking problems instead of outsourcing them to state-sanctioned thugs wrapped in the comforting lie of “community safety”.