Many Americans are beset by images of a dark future. Even the most dispassionate and grounded of us cannot help but wonder if we will ever pay down our enormous national debt, much less reinvigorate our economy and standard of living.
Others, however, see an even starker image through the glass darkly, an Orwelian future in which every aspect of our lives is dictated by a central apparatus that uses the police state to maintain authority and control. They see a future bereft of civil liberties, in which human rights become tortuously compromised with unfeeling functionaries.
This is an unlikely, if not impossible scenario in the United States, however. We may be sheepish, but we are not devoid of all life. We have a storied history of standing up to this type of oppression and tyranny. I don't believe a brutal, totalitarian government will take root here.
However, this does not mean the future is sunlight and rainbows, for a threat is surely looming, one more subtle in form and scope, yet pernicious nonetheless. For as or government grows in size and power, it becomes a bureaucratic juggernaut, an inscrutable machine that surreptitiously spins a labyrinth of rules, regulations, and restrictions that become oppressive in their totality. Over time, this web of fiats, much like a tool of Shakespear's Iago, ensnares us all in its pettiness and complications.
Over time, people fear an American citizenry weighted down by procedural excesses as they create a collective drag on our very being, warping our individualism with group-think, consuming our time with trivial tasks and meaningless motions. It is not the gulags we fear, but rather the tiresomeness of a contrived and unthinking artifice.
Thus, government becomes a wet blanket that smothers our aspirations and entrepreneurial spriit. Much like a small fire in a light, yet persistent mist starts to smolder, our inner drives and passions becomes mere aspirational embers. Our zeal and fierceness that defined the American landscape for more than 150 years will be swapped for endlessly long lines, pointless and redundant paperwork, and undue delays in the ordinary civil processes of life, much like the inhuman mundanity imposed in the former Soviet Union.
And so we will half-heartedly stagger through life with careful measured steps> In an intimation of T.S. Eliot's protagonist in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, we become:
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.
But even fools have choices. How ridiculous is it to choose such a path?
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