"How does it become a man to behave towards this American government to-day? I answer that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it."
~Henry David Thoreau

Mine is not a political blog, others follow the mood-swings of Washington far better than I, but I do want to write a bit on the recent historic decision to force health care onto the American people. "Forcing health care" itself doesn't sound so very bad. Health care is very good when someone is sick, and the "issue of health care" has been harrassing the nation for a long while. But forcing health care on the citizens of the state is like forcing vegetables on an adult - you may have the best intentions, but you are making an ass out of yourself and insulting you guest, who is quite capable of seeing to his own diet. The state goes beyond this insult, by not only insisting on health-care, but also insisting that the people pay for the health-care they don't want.

I'm not incredible informed politically, but I know enough to see that Washington is taking all my decisions out of my own hands, and I resent the intrusion. Washington insists I have health-care, whether I choose to or not. It will decide how best to keep me healthy and it will pay for it with money taken from me. Is there no where I can hide from the greedy arm of the state?

Our nation has lost it's regard for the individual. Looking at man it sees only a crowd of ingnorance with no individual dignity. The state treats man as a greedy child to be cared for, directed, and punished; and man allows himself to be degraded until he can't remember how to stand on his own two feet.

"I please myself with imagining a State at last which can afford to be just to all men, and to treat the individual with respect as a neighbor; which even would not think it inconsistent with its own repose, if a few were to live aloof from it, not meddling with it, nor embraced by it, who fulfilled all the duties of neighbors and fellow-men. A State which bore this kind of fruit, and suffered it to drop off as fast as it ripened, would prepare the way for a still more perfect and glorious State, which also I have imagined, but not yet anywhere seen."
~Henry David Thoraeu