It's hard to be optimistic if you pay attention these days.  The dollar is crashing, oil prices are skyrocketing, your house is worth two-thirds of what you paid for it, and the basic staples of life are eating more and more of the family budget every day.  It's hard to say, "I told you so" to the friends and business partners who overextended themselves in the boom, never anticipating a bust.  It's hard to talk to family members who are victims of circumstance when every breath is labored as they search desperately for a ray of light in the tunnel of despair they find themselves in.  As if from an Orwellian/Hayekian nightmare, the specter of the end of these united states as we know them faces the real possibility of disintegration.

However, the tried and true currency of the realm is appreciating rapidly.  Honesty, free from pandering, and calm, clear-thinking while those about you are losing their heads is winning the day.  It's not so easy as merely compelling the shedding of dogmatic beliefs with a word or two, but requires a redoubling of the efforts of the last three or four decades to show the light to as many people as possible as quickly as possible.

I harbor no illusions that the culprits will roll over and cede the ramparts they've erected around themselves.  Girded only in the righteous facade of democratic assent, the elected have divested themselves of all culpability and are now engaging in the industrial-revolution era tactic of shielding their business friends from civil liability.  "No bank is too big to fail" is quickly revealing itself (as economists much smarter than I have cautioned for years) that the biggest bank is failing before our very eyes.  Still, the numbers are endlessly massaged, the bureaucrats bravely announce that "the worst has passed", and the propaganda arms stoically repeat the encouraging reports from  the bureaucracies. 

These are not surprising signs; they are the death throws of an experiment that was too conservative.

"That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness," hardly sounds conservative, yet within 12 years those same courageous individuals found themselves enacting (or powerless to stop) a move towards a government that had no foreseeable outcome but to become worse than that from which they had recently divested themselves.

Through 42 transfers of executive power, these united states are unique in that the transfer of power has been without bloodshed though, regrettably, bloodshed has, at times, initiated the transfer of power.  This is, in my estimation, the most laudable achievement of the United States; men on the moon pales in comparison.  However, only once in the history of these states have the individuals that define these states taken the extraordinary step that we celebrate today.

Records are meant to be broken.  Deeds are meant to be outdone, and, yet, that deed remains unchallenged for 232 years.

Although, as "prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes," perhaps the non-light and transient cause is government itself.  Transfer of executive power ceased to be sexy when Jefferson assumed the mantle of President.  I'd like to see something more.

Radical - I mean really radical - would consist of placing the "social contract" in front of me every six years and either obtaining my signature or not.  If I may be trusted as an elector of the President, how can I not be trusted to agree to a system of government half again as often?  My estimation is that such a system would result in wild gesticulations from one Senatorial election cycle to another.  However, how better to determine "optimum" government?  Certainly, since the current government results in literal pallets of legislation per year (after 110 sessions), it is far from optimum.

We are at a point in history where the mere illusion of private property in these united states will become outlawed.  The conversation has turned from how much of you and your past you own to whether or not you own yourself or your past at all.  For the first time in American history, it is a mathematical certainty that a socialist will be elected President.  The right to type these words is threatened; the very idea of human rights is subject to the whim of five black-robed justices.

However...I am optimistic.

In the past year, I have touched millions of people with my work.  I've been on the ladders.  My hands are permanently altered to hold screw and staple guns.  I have been on the scene offering eyewitness counterpoint to the propagandists who were nowhere to be found.  I've been behind the camera filming hundreds of folks just like you and me that are proclaiming to the world that the Revolution is still on.  I've seen rays of hope where before I saw only drudgery.  I have not only seen what can happen when individuals are exposed to a new paradigm that includes them, I've helped those individuals to help others along the path of individual sovereignty.

Without fail, from Berlin, NH to Reno, NV, I have found honest individuals who clearly understand that no one could possibly represent them but themselves.  These selfsame individuals, however, have been conditioned - there's no other word for it - to believe that there is either a red or blue solution to their problems.  Unfortunately for the status quo, their solutions are becoming more and more apparent as the problem.  Of course, that's not stopping the politicians from proposing more insane solutions.

I'm still optomistic.  I'm optimistic that, in this age or one near, we shall see a truly free people "and for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor."  This is no mean stretch, and certainly one worth emulating, nay, surpassing in the near future.