We Got Nowhere Else to Go

I see Susan Sarandon recently vowed to join the Hollywood diaspora if a Republican is elected President. Other members of this wandering tribe include Alec Baldwin, Robert Redford, and Eddie Vedder, all who vowed to leave if George W. Bush was elected. If John McCain wins in November, I expect Sarandon to follow in their footsteps - which have been firmly cemented in US soil since Bush's second inaugural.

I don't know if these people are liars, cowards, or were just playing the role of brave, principled dissenters against tyranny. (If the latter, bravo. It's the most convincing performance from any of them in decades.) Whether they stay or go, frankly, all of them are still wimps when it comes to Republican election threats, at least compared to Muriel Kennedy. May she rest in peace.

The threat to move to somewhere better if things don't go your way politically does bring up an interesting point. These liberals have somewhere better to go. If the drive toward socialism isn't going fast enough for them in the US, they have 192 flavors of socialism they can run to elsewhere in the world. From the Canadian Maple Nut Ripple all the way to the North Korean Rocky Road. Pick your favorite level of state control, check some freedom at the border, and go nuts.

Conservatives, on the other hand, have no other country to run to. Nowhere that incorporates economic freedom and individual liberty anywhere close to the USA. At least not since they closed down Hong Kong. This is our only chance.

In other words, as a tall guy with a funny hat once wrote:

We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it. We -- even we here -- hold the power, and bear the responsibility. In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free -- honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.

See, Lincoln knew it. It was the last hope 150 years ago, and it still is. The rest of the world knows this. I should say those in the rest of the world that recognize the value of economic freedom and individual liberty. (The Alec Baldwins of say, Yemen, are still outraged and self-righteous and are threatening to leave for Libya unless the Yemeni government does more to make sure wealth is more evenly distributed).

That's why we have the teeming masses yearning to breath free waiting at the gate (at least until dark, at which point they climb over it). They want freedom, not the opportunity to obey the city of Minneapolis's latest dictate on how long you can idle your car.

The last, best hope sounds like the place to be. Why does Susan Sarandon and Barack Obama want to make us like the rest of the world?

Final thought on having no where to go. Maybe alleged movie "super villains" Hugo Drax and Dr. Evil had good reasons for their move to orbiting satellites of death. Since there was nowhere for an under appreciated capitalist to go on Earth, they had to invent their own societies in space. Of course, I condemn them for their various plans to terrorize, extort and dominate the planet. (These are not the Drax and Evil I came to know). But you have to admire their initiative.