| Sorry to hear about your dad.
My attitudes about social activism like this have changed since I abandoned the idealism of my younger self and have accepted the fact that I've become a realist, a slightly embittered realist. In our modern world with all its fabricated anti-terrorism and patriotic zeal, actions like your father have taken are going against the grain...pissing into the wind, if you will.
Americans don't really want freedom, we want protection. We want to be protected from both the mad bomber at the mall and the uninsured motorist who damages our car but can't pay to have it fixed. We don't want the government to know all about us, but we expect it to know all about potential terrorists and be able to predict their actions. We anticipate the freedom to travel at will around our own country but are uneasy with drug dealers and those potential terrorists having that same freedom. We hope traffic laws will protect us from our own poor driving habits.
So while I sympathize with some of your dad's ideals, I think in this day and age they're impractical and nearly impossible to attain. Not very many people are going to support roads full of uninsured, unregistered, unlicensed drivers deciding for themselves which traffic laws are useful and which should be ignored. |