Somehow, God seems to have designed little things that can overwhelm the big things when conditions are right.
The same thing goes for social organisms. Mankind is very much a social creature and managing society can be difficult. The individual is the smallest unit of society and has very little power to stop a mob from killing him. So government was invented, usually run by the most powerful war-lord in the area. Refinements have come over time and typically a visible or invisible oligarchy forms to control the society either openly or secretly. In our historically unique society we managed to create a social contract that limits the government and uses laws and legislatures to determine how exactly that government will prevent society from destroying itself by crime, collectively or individually.
One of the insidious ideas for social control is democracy. It's a method of governing by the least amount of pain. If the majority agrees, it tends to quiet the minority and usually seems to work out well. But democracy is very much like the sugar addiction and over time it creates social structures that actually damage society in the long run. Pursuing the least pain is not always the best way to go. Pain has a reason for existing but just killing the pain is not fixing the problem that caused it.
A case in point I would like to elaborate on is how fire departments become one of the ways a creeping socialist agenda can get into a community and control it. I live in a rural area of Idaho County that was for many years protected by a volunteer fire department called the "Ridge Runners". This was a free association of neighbors that all took responsibility for protecting their own homes and land from fires and banned together to stop the a fire on one person's property from affecting the rest of the neighborhood. For several decades the "Ridge Runners" effectively fought fires with a perfect safety record and for an amazingly low cost.
Over time, however, we have seen in this area a series of incidents and situations that have made fire protection more costly, less effective and has actually divided our community into warring factions over issues we never had to deal with before.
Around 2007 the RRFD (Ridge Runners Fire District) was created and a board structure came into being manned by local people that wanted to help by "leading". When the 2015 Kamiah fire storm hit, I attended a few meetings brought together by these "leaders" to mobilize the community to fight possible fires in our area. Everyone was anxious to help but it appeared over time that the "leaders" deemed much that was offered as unnecessary or not effective and much of the community was turned off by this kind of attitude. It seemed that the local "leaders" were a bit miffed at this animosity and turned control of the district over to people that were not from this area and didn't even own land in the district. Then came an offer from the RRFD to solicit voluntary subscriptions for fire protection. Seeing very few people respond to this request the RRFD then proposed to the county commissioners that a taxing district be set up. In response to this, the next county commissioner meeting was full of community members telling the county that we did NOT want a taxing district. Despite the overwhelming popular opposition to the idea the county commissioners decided to put the issue on the ballot.
Today we are soon to vote on that issue and local community members have been getting together to try to stop this from passing.
Our area is rapidly growing in population and this is giving a sign to many that this is an opportunity to begin to administer this area in a more standard way that towns and cities are run and the first thing to establish is a well funded fire department.
The people in this area are used to doing things their own way and they do not like the creeping bureaucracy and taxes. Many are poor and on limited incomes yet own significant amounts of land. Tax increases will force many out of the lifestyle they are accustomed to and many will simply have to leave or split up and sell of their property to survive under these costly practices.
Imagine trying to stop an Amoeba from crossing a line. It's tentacles slowly proceed, a little here, a little there and before you know it you have bits of it on your side of the line. You try putting up a fence but it seems to just flow through it. You warn it by chopping of pieces of it and it retreats... for a time... only to later on continue its process of creeping across the line. Eventually the Amoeba has completely crossed the line and the only way to stop it is to chop it in two with an axe.
We have a line for government not to cross. It's called a constitution. We also have a weapon of last resort to stop the government from crossing that line - our guns.
The problem is, Amoebas move slowly and deviously. They can go through the tiniest cracks and they move so slowly that you don't see them even moving at all when you take a quick glance at them. The other problem about fighting these kinds of creeping monsters is that when you respond, it is relatively quick and violent. It makes you look unreasonable. The Amoeba was there for a long time before you finally responded - sometimes creeping over generations. It had established long precedents of trespassing its boundaries and no one objected. And because our social Amoeba of government is actually US, it appears even more that resisting the will of the system seems like an unreasonable crime against the collective, even if such resistance is meant to fix a problem.
This is why republics were invented - a way to limit the majority's power so that it wouldn't eventually eat itself with greed. The core of a republic is a social contract that only gives specific powers to the government and often splits the powers of government among separate branches to force it to compete with itself instead of with the people.
Alas, over time, even the best social contracts can have a flaw. Even the tiniest flaw enables the Amoeba to escape eventually. Our US Constitution, for example, had 14 flaws in it pointed out by the Pennsylvania Minority Report not long after the ink was dry. Of those 14 flaws, 10 were addressed in the bill of rights but unfortunately the last 4 were not. Those 4 flaws have now been used to completely breech the contract and we have the Amoeba creeping into everything these days.
When citizens are vigilant and awake, the Amoeba can almost appear to be petrified. It moves so slowly or sometimes even waits for a new generation to appear before it creeps on in again. This is why "eternal vigilance is the price of freedom".
The Amoeba is fed by human nature. This is why it cannot be completely eliminated - it is the dark side of US. But it can and must be fought constantly and YOU are who must stop it on your watch.
