If you are not free to choose wrongly and irresponsibly, you are not free at all.

– Jacob Hornberger (1995)

“I’m sorry, Michael, I’m through, I’m finished. I can’t stand it anymore. I’m leaving you. I want a divorce. I love you. I always will. But I’m leaving you,” said Patricia Wellington to her husband of thirty years, Michael Wellington.

Patricia Wellington stood in the middle of their living room in their lovely home in Westchester, New York, a beautiful place of rolling green hills topped with expensive homes. Theirs was one of the beautiful homes, full of memories of their children and their lives together. Patricia was 51 years old, auburn hair, brown eyes, still lovely, wearing a summer print dress. She stood looking at Michael Wellington, seeing in her mind’s eye the tall, handsome young lawyer she had married thirty years ago, then seeing the man who had become a distinguished federal judge. She had been proud of him for so long, until he became a judge in the drug enforcement division of the federal court system, ten years ago.

The trouble started when the Reagan administration passed the mandatory drug-sentencing laws and escalated the mad War on Drugs. Michael Wellington, the man she had loved so long, was destroying lives, destroying families, causing children to be put in foster homes. He was doing this when he sentenced hundreds of men and women of all ages to mandatory prison terms of ten years, twenty years, sometimes life-terms for smoking marijuana or growing it in their basements, in their cornfields, on their rooftops. It was this that had been eating away at her — Patricia Wellington did not think that drug users were criminals, but rather that her husband had become the criminal.

“But you can’t mean that Patty, you can’t, not over this, not over this marijuana evil,” pleaded Michael. “You know I have a job to do. You know smoking or growing marijuana is against the law. It’s my job to uphold the law, Patty. That’s my job. Even if I wanted to be lenient with marijuana users, which I don’t, my hands are tied. I didn’t make the laws. The laws force me to give these people mandatory sentences. Don’t you see that, Patty, don’t you? Please don’t leave me over this.”

Patrician Wellington’s head dropped and shook from side to side in pain and sadness. This was the same argument they had for the last five years.

“Michael, if there was a law that put people in prison for smoking cigarettes or drinking beer, would you be sending those people to jail too? I smoke, Michael. Your son and daughter drink wine or vodka sometimes. Would you put them in jail if that were the law, Michael?”

Michael Wellington looked into his wife’s eyes, and said with great sadness but firmness, “Yes, Patti, I would have to. It’s the law. Without law, Patti, there is no civilization. It is only the law that stands between us and anarchy. If I, a judge, don’t uphold the law, who will? Don’t you see how important that is?”

“Michael,” said his wife, “there is a vast difference between law and justice. Law is supposed to uphold justice. Justice is far more important than law. Michael, every monstrous totalitarian regime in history has had laws, thousands of laws. Every tyranny on the face of the Earth has enslaved their people through their laws. The Nazis had such laws. The Soviet communists had their laws. And all those laws were used to enforce the State’s tyranny, to enslave their people. Michael, there is something far more important than the law. Have you ever asked yourself if the laws you defend are just? Have you ever asked if our government has the right to imprison someone for smoking a marijuana cigarette or taking drugs?

“Have you ever asked yourself whether your government has the right to tell someone what he can or cannot smoke, especially if he harms no one but himself? Isn’t the law supposed to protect people from violence or fraud by others? Isn’t the law only supposed to punish people who physically hurt others, and this hurt has to be proved to a jury in court?

Who does a person hurt who smokes marijuana, Michael? Where is the victim the law requires for a crime? If he hurts himself, so what? Doesn’t a person have the right to hurt himself? Don’t we own our bodies, Michael? Don’t I have the right to eat what I want, smoke what I want, drink what I want? Who are these self-righteous politicians to tell someone what they can or cannot put in their own body? These are the same slimy, hypocritical politicians who used drugs when they were young, who tax and regulate us to death. How dare they presume to dictate my personal behavior or the behavior of anyone else. How dare they?”

“But you, Michael, you refuse to see the difference between law and justice, between a law passed by a stupid, power-hungry politician and what is right. The law is supposed to protect our inalienable rights, not some politician’s twisted opinions he wants to shove down everyone’s throat. These politicians we elect are supposed to be our agents, not our masters.”

“Michael, the Nazi judges who they hung at Nuremberg, they said the same things you say. The same things, Michael. They said they were judges, that they were only “following orders.” They said they had a “duty” to follow the laws, the Nazi’s laws, Hitler’s laws, to sentence innocent Germans to prison, shot by a firing squad, or gassed in the chambers by the millions. The judges said the same thing, Michael. They gave the same excuse, may they rot in hell. They were cowards, Michael. They valued their job and their power more than the lives of the innocent people they destroyed in their courtrooms. It was these judges, Michael, these supposed defenders of the law, Nazi law, who should have known better.”

“You think things are that different in American today? Michael, I have contempt for drug-court judges and prosecutors. They are government employees who can’t see beyond their noses. They see a law passed and, like robots, automatically enforce the law in their courtrooms. They don’t judge the law with their conscience. They don’t see the monstrous injustice of the laws, the lives they destroy with their actions. A judge’s duty is to follow the law, but if the law is monstrous, they should quit their jobs. In effect, drug-court judges are not much different than the monster-Nazi judges who sentenced thousands of innocent people in their courtrooms. Their crimes against humanity are only of a lesser degree.”

Michael Harrington turned white, his eyes had a look of total shock. He had heard his wife’s arguments before. But never had she accused him of being like Nazi judges. It rocked him, and something inside him believed her. But something else, something stronger, shut down in him, drawing in, pulling him into a dark cave in his mind. He became furious, murderously furious with his wife for the first time in thirty years.

“Are you saying I’m a murderer, Patricia, that I’m no better than the Nazi judges they tried and executed in the Nuremberg trials? Do you think I should be executed, Patricia? Is that what you are saying? If that is the way you feel, then I think you are right. We should be divorced.”

“Michael,” said his wife, just as furious, “I am saying that what you are doing is evil. You hide behind the law, just like the Nazi judges did. You say it is your duty to uphold these evil laws. So, until you stop doing this, to me you are evil. I’m so sorry to say this, because I don’t want to. But yes, to me you are no different than the Nazi judges. And I cannot live with you any more.”

“I cannot live with a man who sentences people to twenty years in prison for smoking a marijuana cigarette, people who might need that cigarette to treat their nausea from cancer chemotherapy. There are thousands of cancer patients in excruciating pain because chemotherapy makes them violently nauseous, and marijuana is the only thing that can stop the nausea. Yet the law stops them from using marijuana. I cannot live with a man who’s decisions condemn cancer victims to excruciating pain, or to die drowning from their own vomit. I cannot live with a man who destroys families by sending mothers and fathers to prison for twenty years for smoking a lousy joint of marijuana. I cannot live with a man who thinks more of politician’s laws than of justice. I cannot live with you anymore. That is all I have to say, Michael.”

With that, she turned stiffly and walked out the door of the house she had lived in for thirty years, away from the man she had once loved.

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“The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.”  –– H.L. Mencken

The driving force behind the eco-radicals’ fierce efforts to strangle the free market with environmental regulations is their virulent hatred for a free, prosperous economy. Yet behind this hatred is an even deeper one. To understand why they try to wreck our economy, you have to grasp the shocking fact that many eco-radicals hate the human race and Western civilization. They hate the fact that you, your family, your friends, and millions of other human beings live and prosper on this planet.

Most of us are naive about the environmental movement. We believe that when eco-radicals say we should “protect the environment,” they mean we should protect it for people. What they really mean is that we should protect the environment against people. People are the enemy. Rats, swamps, and old-growth forests must be protected against you, your family, and the rest of the human race.

To confirm this, just watch nature programs on public television. In every program I’ve seen, human beings are depicted as the enemy. These programs portray humans as vicious, violent destroyers of birds, wildlife, forests, rivers, and oceans. Nature is seen as “pure,” “fragile,” and “innocent” (including child-eating hyenas and alligators). Environmentalists or their sympathizers create these programs, so the programs reflect the environmental movement’s deepest attitudes toward the human race.

If environmental groups valued human life, they wouldn’t try to cut our oil supplies by banning drilling in arctic wastelands or off the coast of Florida and California. They wouldn’t ban the hunting of alligators that kill children. They wouldn’t file lawsuits against housing developments that give people shelter, to protect kangaroo rats.

They wouldn’t have lobbied Congress to ban DDT, the pesticide that saved the lives of millions of people worldwide from malaria. They wouldn’t ban logging in northwest forests to protect spotted owls, a ban that destroyed over 30,000 logging and sawmill workers’ jobs.

Here’s what one environmentalist had to say about loggers losing their jobs:

“Loggers losing their jobs because of Spotted Owl legislation is, in my eyes, no different than people being out of work after the furnaces of Dachau shut down.”

In other words, forcing owls to move to another forest because you cut down trees they nest in is just as evil as murdering six million people in gas chambers. Owls are as important as six million human lives. If loggers unintentionally kill a few owls, they’re as evil as the murderers who ran the Nazi gas chambers. Therefore, we should have no sympathy for loggers who lost their jobs. Here’s another quote:

“Somewhere along the line . . . we quit the contract and became a cancer. We have become a plague upon ourselves and upon the Earth . . . Until such time as Homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along[emphasis added].”

In other words, this eco-radical wishes the human race to die out—for your family, your children, your friends to die, so that the “sacred” Earth will be free of the “plague” of human beings.

These are quotes by radical environmentalists. These quotes eloquently reveal the eco-radicals’ utter hatred and contempt for the human race, and for human life and progress on this Earth. Are these the kind of sick people that we, and State and Congressional legislators should be listening to?

I knew that the environmental movement values swamps and kangaroo rats over human life, but I didn’t realize how sick this movement really is until I read a shocking article in the New York Times. It seems that in Brazil, “endangered-species” regulations forbid hunting “protected” wildlife. This ban includes the dreaded jacaré and caiman, two Brazilian alligator species.

The jacaré is a vicious, prehistoric, man and child-eating monster who inhabits the Amazon River Basin. In the high-water season, alligators infest the riverbanks near where Mrs. Ramos lives. One evening in August, an eighteen-foot jacaré emerged from the lagoon to forage for food in waters flowing around the stilts of her house. The New York Times article described what happened to Mrs. Ramos’s son:

“Gilson (Mrs. Ramos’s 17-year-old son) went down to tie up his canoe,” said Sidecley Conceicão Andrade, a barefoot, 12-year-old neighbor. “In the dark, he thought he grabbed the canoe, but it was the jacaré’s tail. It took him away and ate him up.”

Can you imagine the horror of being eaten alive by an alligator? Can you imagine the nightmares and searing pain Mrs. Ramos must feel when she thinks of her son? Well, Brazil’s environmental regulations killed her son and hundreds of other innocent victims of alligator attacks.

Imagine that you lived in Florida and were the parents of a beautiful little girl. How would you feel if an alligator protected by the Endangered Species Act snatched your daughter and ate her alive? How would you like hearing your little girl crying for her mommy or daddy while the alligator ripped her to pieces? I apologize for describing such a horror in detail, but I want to bring home the real meaning of environmental laws like the Endangered Species Act. If you want to picture the essence of many eco-radicals’ contempt for human life, just remember what the jacaré did to Mrs. Ramos’s son.

Radical environmentalism and its strangling regulations threatens our health and our lives. But environmentalists can hurt us only because most of us have fallen for their propaganda. The problem is that we’re a good-natured, but sometimes naive people. We give everyone the benefit of the doubt, including environmentalists. We think eco-radicals are normal human beings like we are, and couldn’t possibly mean what they say. That’s what the world thought about Hitler—people didn’t believe what he said in his book, “Mein Kampf.” But we can’t be naive any longer.

We have to judge eco-radicals by their words, values, and actions, and recognize that the agenda of too many environmentalists is evil. The only way to stop them is to de-fang them, to take away their power, to repeal most environmental regulations and abolish the Environmental Protection Agency.

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In our daily lives, most of us believe we are free Americans. The average person can still go about his business, travel where he wants to go, and freely choose his goals, friends, and career. We still have freedom of speech, the press, trial by jury, and many other liberties our Founding Fathers wrote into the Bill of Rights and Constitution. We are still freer than any other people on Earth.

Yet, consider the following:

We may still have fundamental freedoms of speech and the press, but America is in a transition from liberty to despotism, a halfway house on the road to tyranny. We already have economic tyranny in America. If you add up all the taxes you pay, including income taxes, Social Security, sales, real estate, gasoline, telephone, and dozens of other hidden taxes, government loots over forty percent of your hard-earned income in taxes.

Yet, only a hundred years ago, the average worker paid no more than five percent of his income in taxes. In 1901, there was no income tax, Social Security tax, or most of the other taxes you pay today. In the Middle Ages, medieval rulers took about 20 percent of their serfs’ produce. Our government now taxes us worse than serfs. If government claims the right to forty percent of your income, it claims the right to forty percent of your labor, and forty percent of your life. In effect, the people we “elect” have put us on a chain gang until May 10th of every year, working for the bureaucrats.

Most parents may not see it this way, but local governments, in effect, kidnap your children through public-school compulsory-attendance laws. They force you to send your children to government (public) schools that waste twelve years of your children’s lives and turn them into illiterates. They then tax you to support these so-called “schools.”

“War on Drugs” government SWAT teams can break down your door in the middle of the night without a warrant, based on the drug tip of a malicious, anonymous informant, then threaten you in your own living room. Drug laws dictate what we can or cannot put in our own bodies. These laws tell us we do not have the right to smoke marijuana, even if we have cancer and the marijuana alleviates the nausea from chemotherapy drugs.

Government tells us we cannot commit suicide if we have terminal cancer with excruciating pain, nor can a doctor assist us to commit suicide. By these laws, government tells us it now owns our bodies. These laws deny our right of free choice for important personal decisions in our lives.

Try building a new home for yourself, and you will run into a hornet’s nest of building department inspectors, zoning commissions, environment impact statements, and local agencies who will tie you up in knots. Try starting a small business and you will need government licenses and approvals. Local, State and Federal tax authorities, like vultures, will then devour your profits with their ever-increasing taxes.

Taxes loot your hard-earned money to pay for dozens of “entitlement programs” such as Medicare, Medicaid, farm subsidies, corporate subsidies, welfare programs, health care for illegal immigrants, and now a “welfare” program for the entire population of Iraq called the Iraq war. Your voluntary consent is not required for these programs. Government forces you to pay for them.

Federal, State, and local police agencies use asset-forfeiture laws to steal the cars, homes, businesses, and bank accounts of innocent people under the pretext of a War on Drugs. Victims of drug raids then have to prove their innocence and sue the agency to get their property back. Asset-forfeiture laws have turned too many local police departments into agencies for legalized looting.

Anti-gun politicians make thousands of gun laws that restrict a woman’s right to protect herself from a rapist, a homeowner’s right to protect himself from a robber in the middle of the night, or American citizens’ right to protect themselves from a tyrannical government. The 2nd Amendment to the Constitution that guarantees our right to bear arms is under massive assault. It may be only a matter of time until we lose this right altogether.

Equal Employment Opportunity Commission regulations can control who an employer hires, fires, or promotes, how much he has to pay his employees (minimum wage), and what their “conditions of employment” must be. This same agency can sue an employer into bankruptcy for “discrimination” or other “infractions” of its regulations.

Because of the recent Supreme Court “Kelo” decision, your property rights have become null and void. Now any developer who wants to put up a new shopping center can get your local government to condemn your home, and your neighbors’ homes, through their power of “eminent domain.” Local government bureaucrats can now demolish your home, not for public use like a highway, but to let a private developer profit from your land and pay more taxes.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) can stop a home builder from building homes, a farmer from farming his land, a rancher from grazing his cattle, an oil company from drilling for desperately needed oil, or a logging company from cutting down trees to give us lumber for new homes. EPA regulations sharply jack up the price of oil and destroy property rights in America for a great and noble cause — to protect “endangered” species like the Alabama mud rat, mosquito-infested swamps called “wetlands,” and “delicate” frozen Arctic wastelands that look like the surface of the moon.

The Food and Drug Administration forces drug companies to spend over $500 million and seven years to get approval for a new drug. It puts pharmaceutical companies through a regulatory torture chamber that strangles the development of thousands of new, life-saving drugs. It has made SWAT-team raids on vitamin stores to “protect” us from Vitamin C and other dangers.

Federal agents can persecute a religious sect they don’t like, as the Feds did in Waco, Texas. They persecuted these people partly because the sect owned allegedly “illegal” firearms, firearms the 2nd Amendment says they had the right to own. After slaughtering innocent women and children in a ball of fire, none of the Federal agents were ever prosecuted or sent to prison for their actions.

Finally, in response to the Sept. 11th terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, the Federal government passed an “anti-terror” bill that created secret military tribunals. These tribunals will be like medieval star-chambers, where defendants’ legal rights will be ripped to pieces, and trial by jury will be denied.

These tribunals have set a terrible precedent. It is only a matter of time before government prosecutors expand the vague definition of “terrorism” to an ever-widening list of “crimes” that can be used against American citizens. Government judges and prosecutors will then be able to try and convict Americans without the “messy” need for juries, proof, evidence, or the presumption of innocence.

Does all this sound like “the land of the free?” Government in America is a growing tyranny. It is a government that would shock our Founding Fathers, a government they would consider a greater tyranny than the British monarchy they fought a revolutionary war against. Worse, whatever freedoms we have left are being taken from us at an ever-accelerating rate.

If you, my reader, do not see this, it is not your fault. Your liberty has been taken from you gradually, one new tax and regulation at a time. You have become accustomed to the taxes and regulations. You think they are “normal” and therefore nothing to complain about. You mistakenly believe that because you elect your representatives, and because they enact laws based on majority rule, that their laws, taxes, and regulations are moral and legitimate. It is like your wife or husband not noticing you have gained thirty pounds over the past five years because they see you every day, and the weight gain was gradual.

So it is with gradual tyranny. But if Americans living 150 years ago suddenly came back to life today, they would be shocked, for they would see the stark difference in their freedom.

President Obama continues to waste hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of American lives to protect the “freedom” of the Iraqi people. Well, how about first giving Americans back the freedom that is their birthright, the constitutional freedoms our Founding Fathers fought and died for?

Still think you’re living in the land of the free?

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