The Free Fucking Bacon Problem

I’ve talked about a lot of fucking things lately, but there seem to be two common threads running through most of them: people suck, and American liberty is at risk of dying. Both of these things are true. And I’m beginning to think one might have a hell of a lot to do with the other.

I was struck by this realization this morning after breakfast, once the heat of my anger from being involuntarily exposed to other people’s fucking speakerphone conversations had subsided. I started thinking about the rest of what I’d watched in that hotel breakfast room, and good fucking God, we are an entitled bunch of cunts. People wandered around completely oblivious to everyone else, nearly plowing into one another while searching desperately for their favorite breakfast item. They stepped in front of people. Reached around people. Demanded that others move out of their way. After all, they paid for their room. They’re fucking entitled.

Newsflash: buying a hotel room doesn’t make the rest of humanity your fucking staff. And buying that room with money you inherited from Grandma, who actually fucking worked for it, doesn’t make you lord of the goddamned breakfast buffet either.

I watched a bunch of soft, overfed motherfuckers roaming around the dining area bitching because some other soft, overfed motherfucker took all the fucking bacon. I watched people pointing at their mouths and uttering nonsensical fucking grunts toward hotel employees as though the poor bastard behind the counter was supposed to personally shovel scrambled eggs into their mouths one fucking spoonful at a time. These weren’t helpless people. These were grown-ass adults behaving as though the entire machinery of the hotel existed to make absolutely certain they never experienced fourteen consecutive seconds of inconvenience.

Entitlement.

And maybe that’s the fucking connection I’ve been looking for, because liberty requires something from you. That’s the part nobody seems to want to talk about anymore. Everybody loves the word freedom. Put that shit on a T-shirt. Slap it on the back of your truck. Wave a flag. Shoot some fireworks. Fuck yeah, America. But actual liberty requires responsibility. It requires risk. It requires effort. It means nobody promises everything is going to work out. You might make the wrong decision. You might lose. You might fail spectacularly. You might even go fucking hungry.

Then you get back up and try again.

Liberty means eating what you fucking kill, and the only thing some of these people seem interested in killing is time and liberty, neither of which is particularly fucking edible. It’s much easier when somebody else handles everything. Somebody else makes the rules. Somebody else decides what’s safe. Somebody else decides what’s fair. Somebody else fixes the problem. Somebody else absorbs the risk. Somebody else cooks the fucking bacon.

This is why we have precooked bacon at the fucking grocery store, for fuck’s sake. It’s apparently no longer enough that somebody else raises the hog, feeds the hog, kills the hog, butchers the hog, cures and smokes the belly, slices the fucking thing, packages it, refrigerates it, ships it across the country, and places it conveniently on a shelf ten fucking minutes from your house. Nope. Now somebody needs to cook the fucking bacon for you, too.

And before somebody gets their panties twisted around their fucking ankles, I understand technological progress. I’m not advocating that everyone start slaughtering hogs behind their fucking apartment building. Convenience is wonderful. I fucking love convenience. But there’s a difference between appreciating convenience and expecting the entire world to continuously rearrange itself so that you never have to expend effort, tolerate discomfort, accept risk, or wait five fucking minutes for more bacon.

Convenience says, Holy shit, somebody invented precooked bacon.

Entitlement says, Where the fuck is my bacon?

And I think we’re becoming a culture of Where the fuck is my bacon?

That’s where this stops being about breakfast and starts being about liberty. Because if you spend your entire life expecting somebody else to remove every inconvenience, solve every problem, mitigate every risk, and protect you from every bad outcome, why the fuck wouldn’t you eventually expect government to do exactly the same thing? Life uncomfortable? Fix it. Something risky? Regulate it. Somebody made a bad decision? Ban it. Somebody might get hurt? Mandate something. Somebody has something you don’t have? Take care of that, too.

It’s the same fucking mentality I keep running into over and over again. Responsibility is difficult. Liberty is difficult. Making your own decisions is difficult because sometimes you make the wrong fucking decision and nobody is standing there to save you from the consequences. But that’s part of the fucking bargain. You cannot separate liberty from responsibility and still have liberty. Eventually what you have is dependency with a fucking flag hanging over it.

And yes, this is where my politics come screaming into the fucking breakfast room. I look at the political left and see a philosophy far too comfortable with government intervention as the solution to human problems. More regulation. More programs. More oversight. More rules designed to protect people from themselves and one another. People on the left will obviously describe that philosophy differently, and there are plenty of disagreements even among liberals about where government authority should begin and end. But from where I stand, every time responsibility moves away from the individual and toward the state, I want somebody asking whether we’re actually solving a problem or simply making people more comfortable surrendering responsibility for themselves.

Because government is always fucking willing to take it.

Another responsibility? Sure, hand it over. Another decision? We’ll take that too. Another risk you don’t want to carry? No problem. Another uncomfortable consequence you’d rather avoid? We’ll write a fucking regulation.

And eventually you wake up and discover that you’ve surrendered an enormous amount of control over your own life one perfectly reasonable fucking compromise at a time. Nobody had to kick down your door and take your liberty. You handed it over because carrying it became inconvenient.

That’s the part that scares the shit out of me.

Not because I think everybody needs to become some rugged individualist living in a cabin, growing potatoes, forging horseshoes, slaughtering pigs, and wiping their ass with fucking pinecones. A functioning society obviously requires people to depend on one another. That isn’t the same thing as entitlement. There’s a difference between participating in a society built on cooperation and believing that society owes you freedom from every fucking hardship.

Everyone who has genuinely tried to build something in this life has had it hard at some point. Everybody has failed. Everybody has hurt. Everybody has needed help. There’s no fucking shame in needing help, and there’s no weakness in accepting it when someone freely offers it. But there is a difference between accepting help and believing you are fucking entitled to somebody else’s labor, money, time, property, attention, or sacrifice simply because you want or need something.

And there’s a difference between asking government to protect your liberty and asking government to relieve you of the responsibility that comes with having it.

Seriously, hey Commie bastards, here’s a fucking tactical hint: if you want to conquer America, attack before eleven. Half the fucking population will still be standing around the hotel breakfast trough waiting for somebody to refill the bacon. Just make sure you invade quietly because the other half will be on speakerphone and won’t fucking hear you coming.

Okay, maybe that’s slightly unfair.

But only fucking slightly.

Because I keep coming back to the same thought: people too lazy to exercise liberty eventually aren’t going to care very much when somebody takes it away. Liberty is work. Liberty requires participation. It requires people willing to make decisions, accept consequences, tolerate risk, occasionally fail, and then get their asses back up and try again. It requires citizens rather than customers standing at the fucking counter pointing at their mouths and waiting to be fed.

Maybe that’s why the free fucking bacon bothered me so much. It wasn’t really the bacon. It was the expectation behind it—the assumption that somebody else should always be standing nearby, ready to make everything easier.

Feed me. Protect me. Provide for me. Decide for me. Just don’t make me responsible for any of it.

Fuck that.

Put your own goddamned bacon in the oven.

Liberty, unlike the fucking Marriott breakfast buffet, doesn’t magically refill itself.