Choose your own culture
One dystopian society where you can walk around in the street with assault rifles if you’re white, threaten people with guns from your front lawn if you’re white, storm the legislative house.to intimidate the lawmakers if you’re white. If you don’t like taxes, don’t worry, you won’t have to pay them, or maybe only the working class and middle class have to pay them, certainly not the rich or the big corporations. Instead, put user fees on everything — private toll roads, private police, private fire departments. Take the vote away from women and people of color — in fact, only white landowners get to vote. Armed soldiers patrol the streets in poor neighborhoods. Religious laws are enacted to require church attendance and enforce “morality”.
Or, one imperfect but very different society, where you accept regulations on the types of guns that can be owned and the training required to possess them. You’ll have to pay taxes. In this society you won’t be allowed to refuse service or refuse to hire people based on their color or personal identities. Corporations are taxed and so are people, but there are public schools, public healthcare, publicly funded police, fire, roads. Your estate can be passed onto to your kids and friends not to exceed $10 million or $2 million per individual heir, but the rest will be used to fund a public trust that gives poorer kids a nest egg for their start in adult life. Because less inequality is essential for a democracy.
Sign on to one or the other, for yourself.
This thought exercise is where I end up when I think about how frustrating it is that they fight for the freedom to carry guns so they can carry them to disrupt our peaceful rallies. How wrong it is that we can’t build our own society with some “commons” in it to soften the pains of poverty. That so many good ideas can’t get implemented because we are stuck on the same stupid primitive battles. That the “taker states” that elect people like McConnell don’t even admit or understand that they are taker states.