David McElroy

I’m appalled at pictures of protesters lately holding up signs proclaiming that they’re part of a “Resistance” movement. These left-wing progressives are sincere in opposing Trump’s version of government oppression, but they want their own version of oppression as a replacement.

If you resist oppression by one jackbooted thug — but not oppression by another — you’re just a partisan political hack, not someone standing for genuine freedom. I can’t take your “resistance” seriously unless you oppose oppression from all sides and stand for the natural rights of every individual to make his or her own voluntary choices — whether you agree with that person or not.

For centuries, hardly anybody questioned the notion that everyone had a duty to obey whatever king or other thug had seized control of a territory. That was accepted as obvious, even though it seems ludicrous to us now.

Today, hardly anybody questions the idea that all individuals must rightly obey the will of a majority of people around them. If you ever look honestly at the moral reasoning behind this idea, you will find it’s no more reasonable or moral than forcing people to obey a king.

If you truly want to resist government — which is simply organized oppression — you need to do it all the time, not just when you’re angry about losing an election and having “the other side” ruling over you. If you really want to resist government coercion, those of us who support a voluntary system will welcome you.

But that’s not what you want. You like coercion — when your team is in charge and it’s other people being forced to obey.

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When I feel despair about the rest of the world being insane and irrational, I take comfort in the feeling that the greatest sanity and reason around me come in the form of cats and dogs.

They never lie — to us or to themselves — and they’re completely transparent about who and what they are.

When the humans around me seem to be doing their best to make the world a horrible place, I appreciate the love and consistency I experience from those such as Alex, who you see in my arms late Saturday night. He’s a great comfort to me on a night such as this, when the humans around me feel insane and irrational.

There are times when the evil in the world is so clear that it seems as though every person of good will must see it and recoil from it, but I know that isn’t true. Not yet.

But on this night when the evil and dishonesty of the powers around me are so incredibly clear — even more than usual — I feel despair about whether most people will ever again care about truth and decency and morality.

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For almost all of human history, survival itself required effort. Not ambition. Not self-actualization. Not fulfillment. Effort.

If you didn’t work, plan, improvise and endure, you didn’t eat. If you didn’t cooperate with others, you didn’t last long. If you weren’t resourceful, disciplined or at least lucky, your life ended early and harshly.

That reality shaped us. It shaped our bodies, our minds and our sense of who we were. For tens of thousands of generations, human beings learned something fundamental about themselves: I can do hard things — and my life is better because I did them.

That knowledge wasn’t philosophical. It wasn’t abstract. It was visceral. You could see it in the shelter you built, the crops you harvested, the animals you raised, the children you kept alive. Effort led to results, and results led to confidence. Self-esteem was not something you talked about. It was something you earned.

Then, slowly at first, and then very quickly, everything changed.

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