Stop Being Stupid: An Independence Day Diatribe

Freedom.

The word has a certain scent to it…like mountain air, or dryer sheets. As a word, the double-E takes the inflection soaring skyward with confidence. It’s a well-built word for what it represents.

All Americans have it in this day and age, and it’s really neat! You can do lots of cool things with freedom, like stay up all night for no reason, or decide you really like Astro Vans even though your friends think they’re stupid. Freedom gives you the ability to sleep with your head where your feet usually go, or feed your hamster peanut butter. There’s an airy delight that comes with knowing you aren’t on any set path.

But there are some downsides to it, too. It's stuff that we can't do much about, either, save for making sure our sovereign selves aren't dumbasses.

You can decide that everyone else should like Astro Vans as much as you do. And if they still think Astro Vans are stupid after you’ve told them what you know to be the truth, you might want to slap them. And if their dog gets hit by an Astro Van, you might be super sure the dog died because (by proxy) it thought Astro Vans were stupid. You have the freedom to protest the dog’s funeral…and you might just do it, because everyone should know what happens when you don’t like Astro Vans.

And you are totally free to do that. Legally. Our Constitution accidently protects stupidity, too, much to the dismay of everyone else.

Here is an explanation in the form of a 10-part, easy-to-use narrative. It may help you navigate the vast minefields of freedom as they relate to rights, law, and stupidity, but it will not ever change the rights of stupid people. You may find the format familiar:

1. You’re only legally allowed to do tasteless things because someone assumed you were civilized and reasonable. Though Thomas Jefferson and James Madison didn’t know you personally, they gave you the benefit of the doubt, probably because they had a lot of reasonable friends.

2. While it’s philosophically significant to say that “guns don’t kill people; people kill people,” it’s only acceptable to say aloud if you can admit that (a) saying such a thing implies that you are above needing a gun, because it’s universally understood that killing people is a bad thing. Also, (b) it’s way easier to kill someone for a stupid reason with a gun than without one.

3. No army can occupy your house if you say no, until they pass a law that says they can. Not that they’d want to. Protip: choose living arrangements that are not fancied by armies, just in case.

4. The cops have no right to bust your door down while you’re feeding peanut butter to your hamster, creating an Astro Van shrine, or doing anything else freedom-oriented. But sometimes, they think the peanut butter is heroin or a nuke and they shoot you for the trouble. It’s semi-rare, but that’s the trick landmine: not a whole lot you can do about it after the fact. Guns don’t kill people; people kill people.

5. Though some of our founding fathers had a lot of faith in mankind, they knew that even they themselves couldn’t be trusted when angry.
For instance: If you convince enough people to dig Astro Vans, and then your dog got hit by a school bus, you’d be angry enough to march right on over to the school board superintendent and demand to know why they deal death and evil to children. Trusting your legal system, you call the police. Because you are so angry and upset, an arrest is made for good measure. A trial date is set, guaranteeing the accused a competent and random jury. Odds are good that at least 50% of them do not much care for Astro Vans.

6. Within our legal system, the superintendent is not seen through the lens of others’ beliefs. He is quite sure he’ll get to go home soon, as he doesn’t even drive a school bus, and the whole thing is silly, anyway.

7. Because trials take forever, the superintendent insists that the dog was worth less than $20. The Judge agrees via yawn. Superintendent is allowed to leave after paying $80.00 in court fees.

8. After you find him, you murder the superintendent with a carburetor, because he clearly ordered that school bus full of children to murder your dog. And though you are super guilty, you won’t get murdered at the hands of some people who don’t much care for Astro Vans as punishment. For you are safely in jail, after a jury of your peers deem you guilty of murder by a ratio of 6:4. The jury is free to vote “not guilty,” even if all evidence is to the contrary. You take solace in the fact that 40% of the jury believes that it was cool of you to kill that guy.

9. You slip on a mystery puddle in your cell and land on the concrete, cracking your skull. Within ten years of your martyrdom, your cult qualifies as a religion. Because our basic rights are not limited, and the First Amendment covers religious freedom, the subsequent wave of Astro Van thefts is openly claimed to be part of religious ritual – your followers know their rights, because though you are their founder and martyr, they secretly don’t want to end up like you did. It is legal grey area, but no one who had an Astro Van stolen likely wanted to keep it around, anyway.

10. The Astro Legacy flees, and concentrates in West Virgina, building van shrines with whatever they can. The following years will be hard times for the Astro Legacy, for their prophet is dead, and they are cast out. They find solace in the kindly people who reside in West Virginia, and before they know it, there won’t be a shred of Astro ambivalence in the whole state. In 20 years’ time, they will put their Astro Commandments out in front of their courthouse, made of imported plywood, and lacquered up all shiny-like.
Every once in awhile, the Fed will come in and try to say it’s illegal to display such a thing, but they can’t really do anything because the states themselves reserve the right to expound upon the Constitution’s specifics, including the First Amendment. Eventually, the government will give up, because when it comes down to it, the quarrel is over your dumb ass liking an Astro Van once upon a time, and that shit just is not worth it.

But when your stupid ass followers get a President elected, start a bunch of wars over your beliefs after you’re dead and invade an already war-torn country with a drone army modeled after an outdated minivan, a lot of people are going to wish it’d been worth it to somebody.

The moral of the story: you are free to get mad at people who don’t believe what you believe, but you are not free to kill them because of it – just de-friend them on Facebook or something. There are parts of the world that have suffered for centuries under people who impose their beliefs upon others. Our legal system is designed to prevent this from happening, while giving us the freedom to believe whatever suits our worldview – even if it’s stupid – because they assumed we weren’t. Don’t prove them wrong.

Killing people in the name of belief is pretty stupid, but never underestimate the power of human belief. This Fourth of July, listen to the fireworks – the reason we light them is because they remind us of our own Revolution, when a bunch of yokels led by philosopher-leaders defeated the entire British Royal Army.

That’s pretty fucking impressive, but our leaders will not always be philosophers. In fact, that is the understatement of the century – in the last decade, we chose a President…twice…who believed that his God gave America the freedom that we non-gays enjoy, waged a war in the name of it by pulling a number 4 and lying to an entire country to do it. He got away with it, without ever acknowledging that the people he killed were doing the same thing, or that America enjoys its freedom specifically because our sometimes-Atheist founding fathers wrote our God-Damned Constitution.

(Fun Fact: God’s First Commandment specifically forbids anyone to believe or worship what they want, unless it's him. America’s First Amendment specifically says the opposite.)

(Fun Fact: If New Testament God [the softie] had written the Constitution, he would have written it for the whole world – not just the America part of the world, because by New Testament rules, he loves everybody. The fact that he didn't doesn't mean we have to go write it for them, especially if they don't want us to. And we certainly shouldn't kill them to get a point across, because it's specifically forbidden by the Fifth Commandment.)

(Fun Fact: Old Testament God played favorites. Our Constitution does not, as it protects stupid people, too.)

Be happy enough with your own freedom, and feed peanut butter to a hamster. It’s funny because it gets stuck to the roof of their mouth and they lick their lips a lot afterwards.