“May you have the hindsight to know where you have been,
And the foresight to know where you are going,
And the insight to know when you have gone too far.”

— An Irish blessing

There is a certain echo in this room when I know my neighbour’s rolling his rubbish bin to the road.

A hollow sound that bounces, like thunder rumbling underground.

Then, a measured silence.

Finally, an internal combustion engine cranks us and the neighbour’s not long in the driveway before he rumbles and bounces off to parts unknown.

I have heard this set of sounds for nearly my whole life, in more than one country, in American, Canadian, English, German and Irish suburban tracts, as if the Earth’s rotation depended on it.

Today, my neighbour is the example I want to use to remind myself, as I often do, about the consequences of the parallel storyline in this blog.

On the tellie recently, one man verbally barked at the English host of the show about the threats to American liberty that the British invasion — a sort of silent cultural revenge by the Brits on the Americans for losing the East Coast of the North American continent to a bunch of refined and undignified revolutionaries a couple of centuries ago — has slowly eroded the natural rights and freedoms enumerated in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.

We could build upon this verbal redeclaration and upset the apple cart from which our mix of freedom-loving Ruralites, Urbanskis, Suburbanians, Entitlementists and Provisionists feeds with little fear of an unstable economy, society and government.

Is my neighbour a sheep ready for shearing, happy to walk the fields, thinking it has the freedom to pick whatever grass it wants to eat, subconsciously depending on fences and shepherds to protect it from harm?

But where does the lamb meat in gyros come from?

Is my neighbour like the rabbits in Watership Down who were unaware of their impending doom?

What others lessons from literature and history may I draw conclusions from?

Do Native Americans celebrate the same freedom/right-enumerating documents that U.S. citizens do?

When a system has temporary representatives who are demonised by one group or another revolving in and out of public consciousness, can we build fury into enough citizens to overturn the system itself because the representatives are never in place long enough to incite wrath against them as symbolic crooked/corrupt leaders worth taking down?

In other words, where is the moral imperative?

What is the concrete intersection of security and freedom that blocks our civilisation from truly prospering?

When is violent opposition by the minority justified to save the majority from its dull, blasé, safely-corraled lifestyle(s)?

What about when that minority is fighting against tyranny of the global economy which acts like a conformist Urbanski monster eating up freedom-loving Ruralites like there’s no tomorrow?

There are still places where you can step off the grid, so to speak, but is it as easy to grow and sell your food in the marketplace to support your grid-free living (after all, you probably have to pay taxes to some entity that claims protection of your land) like when local bartering was the norm rather than today’s global economies of scale that make small-scale farming seem less competitive than it used to be?

What exactly is the freedom-loving minority going after?

What would a new Declaration of Independence look like?

How can a group of people as diverse as seven billion of us be convinced that the current system where we live and which we actively support — with rubbish bins, cars, roads, houses, adult/children daycare, cashless transactions, security cameras and precrime units that arrest children for expressing their anger in creative, noncriminal ways  — is dangerous for us in the longterm?

If you observe some of the stuff that passes as art these days, there’s plenty of freedom to express yourself, regardless of function, utility or economic viability of the art in the global economy, so I can’t see that the “New World Order” is suppressing freedom of expression in that sense.

You can appear on national television and make all sorts of crazy comments, garnering a loyal following and a multimillion-dollar lifestyle.

You can become an international sensation on the Internet overnight.

I’m willing to listen to a group that claims it has been trampled on by society at large but I need hard, concrete facts to analyse and support my willingness to take that group’s claims to the general public for consideration.

Otherwise, I have planets to populate and solar systems to explore where new groups will have to learn to live with one another and their autonomous robotic counterparts in the same old, new ways as before.