Useful thoughts for Independence Day

I was going to come up with something pithy, but Claire beat me to it. And did a much better job.

So on this Independence Day of wars and surveillance and militarized cops and armed bureaucrats, and all the other endless dreck and dross the state builds up to get in our way, we can be of good cheer.

Because while government, even in the most charitable viewpoint, is far from holy, the human spirit is sacred and free.

Also creative and wide-ranging and not easy to capture. We have something — many somethings — no government ever will. Free hearts and minds can go places and do things no state on earth can attempt — or even understand. We are the makers, the imaginers, the tricksters, the inventors, and the sources of love and joy. We are sometimes the rats that bite right through the wall of the maze. We are the unpredictable, the clever, the sideways-thinking-monkeywrench-in-the-machinery-shifting-the-paradigm forces who create the future. We are people. We are The People.

The least among us — and some of us count ourselves pretty lowly — are greater than the greatest state that ever collected a tax or beat innocents into submission.

RTWT.