Twenty years ago I could see the changing business horizon in my field and I decided to take steps in order to remain competitive into the foreseeable future.  I own and operate a small business in upstate New York that at that time conducted insurance adjustments, appraisals and investigations exclusively for insurance carriers.  I determined that the addition of a private investigators licensure would expand my customer base as well as its reach.  With that, I could work for attorneys, municipalities, as well as local, state and federal governmental agencies.

I carefully reviewed the license application instructions and determined that I was more than qualified by experience and education.  It was also clear to me that the entire licensing process in NY had been drawn around the concept that retired police officers would be given carte blanc entry into the field, needing to do nothing more than take a test and make the application.  What I failed to notice that the rules for attaining the license were not only pro-police but anti-everyone else.  I found this out when my initial application was denied.

I filed an appeal and the person handling my file demanded scores of files in order to review my past investigatory cases.  I complied.  She demanded even more.  I again complied.  She denied the license again.  I appealed.  This time it went to an Administrative Law Judge, (ALJ) for a formal hearing.  The judge reversed the State and my license was issued, some 18 months after the initial application.

 Fast-forward to the present.

 I continue to hold my private investigators license in New York, (NY) and now I am also licensed in Colorado, (CO.)  Renewal of both are due in the spring at about the same time. 

 Here is how it works in NY.

A paper renewal package arrives via US mail.  This must be completed using a pen, hand-writing various bits of information and hand-checking off various boxes.  A surety bond must be secured, (again, in pages of physical paper,) and it must be notarized and then include into the returned-by-snail-mail process.  This package of material must arrive at least 6-weeks before the expiration of the license, or you are assessed an additional $100.00 on top of the $500.00 license renewal fee.  The bond is another $100.00.

A week after sending my NY renewal package back to the state, it was returned to me.  The reason?  My bonding agent had included my mailing address on the bond and not my physical address.  No indicators in the instructions that this was a requirement, and furthermore, the state already has this information in the myriad of other paperwork I have had to submit to them over the years.  The bonding agent has to prepare a bond rider and then the entire package is re-mailed back to the state and the late fee of $100.00 tacked on as a thank you gift.

I am then reminded, in thick black print that I am prohibited from practicing without my renewed license and if history is any indicator, I should receive it in 6 to 8 weeks.

 Here is how it works in CO.

An email arrives in my inbox indicating it is time to renew my CO private investigators license.  A link is included that tells me what I need to have at the ready for making my renewal and then asks if I want to continue.  I do, and the entire renewal process takes all of 15-minutes, all done on-line in real time.  I elect to pay with my credit card and my license is created and printable immediately. 

 Oh, and the fee?  $16.00

 NY is the most cumbersome and over-regulated bureaucratic juggernaut that exists within the 50-United States.  No wonder people are voting with their feet and leaving by the thousands every week.  In a recent dust-up between NYS Governor Cuomo and the federal government concerning the use of federal funds to help NY during this pandemic, Senator Rick Scott of Florida, (as well as the former governor of that state) had the following comments about NY leadership.  I think his words are right on and are excerpted here from his recent Wall Street Journal editorial.

“New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo said it was “irresponsible” and “reckless” not to bail out states like his, a state with 2 million fewer people than Florida and a budget almost double the size of ours. The opposite is true. It’s irresponsible and reckless to take money from American taxpayers and use it to save liberal politicians from the consequences of their poor choices.”

 Bingo.

 This pandemic will provide Cuomo with the perfect storm of political slight-of-hand.  He will blame all of his fiscal mismanagement on the pandemic while simultaneously carving out his own TV mini-series that should be entitled:  I’m Running For President.”

 Frank Sinatra famously sang about New York claiming that…”if you could make it there you could make it anywhere…” and he was right.  Given persevering under the rule of Covid-King Cuomo, anywhere is looking better and better.

Emperor Andrew the Adroit announced today the opening of the sixth re-education camp in Newer York.  Christened Camp Covid, this facility joins the other five camps spread throughout the Adirondack region, Camp Compliance, Camp Corona, The Masked Retreat, Camp Ventilator and The Muzzled Inn.

“I am happy to tell you, the calm and compliant, that those barbarians who keep babbling about individual rights, freedoms, the Constitution, and all of that other ancestral nonsense are being aggressively re-programmed to understand the greater good of assimilating into a nice, homogenized group and letting go of those archaic notions of self.”

“Yesterdays drone spottings and satellite images were very disappointing,” declared the Emperor.  “We continue to see evidence of clear-headed thinking and skepticism in many of our non-compliant neighbors.  The reward monies for reporting individuals exercising their freedoms are now being boosted to $100.00 for any call resulting in the arrest and relocation of the malcontent to one of our camps.”

While Covid-19 illnesses have all but stopped, Andrew the Adroit believes that compliance, obedience and a healthy dose of fear are all that is required to make for a happy and calm citizenry.  We trust that you agree, but if you don’t, we encourage your neighbor to call immediately the number we all have had to memorize, if we want that check every month, 1-800-SCREWED.

Publicly declaring, “Give me liberty or give me death”, immortalized Patrick Henry in 1775.  He wasn’t speaking abstractly or engaging in hyperbole.  Soon thereafter the colonies were at war with Great Britain and over 100,000 lives would take those famous words to their graves.  The founders ended their declaration of independence by swearing to each other allegiance guaranteed with, “our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.” 

They weren’t kidding.

Fast-forward almost 250 years and today, many are trading that liberty for what they believe is safety.  In 1820, if you insulted a man’s integrity you might well die in a duel.  In 2020, wide-spread self-loathing and an entitlement mentality have emptied the soul of many and hobbled the very concept of the American spirit and with it their sense of honor and integrity. 

Libertas, the Roman goddess sculpted as the Statue of Liberty stands in the NY harbor as the national symbol of American freedom, a gift from France in 1886.  Today, does she continue to represent hope, or our own despair?

Alexis de Tocqueville, the famous French philosopher who marveled at America’s creation offered a cautionary harbinger that I share with him, even though it was written over 150-years ago.

“I have remained an old and outmoded lover of liberty in a time when everyone desires a master.”

Every day, under the guise of safety, our freedoms are taken away, one by one by those posing as our masters.  Police arrest a solitary surfer on a deserted beach in California.  The Colorado father, arrested for playing catch in an empty park with his 6-year-old daughter.  Parishioners in Ashville, Mississippi, in their cars, windows up, in the church parking lot receiving God’s message, ticketed and disbursed after the lead police officer announces to the pastor that he is, “suspending his rights.”  Witnessing a veteran black police officer in Mississippi telling a black pastor that his rights are being suspended is something that should shock the consciousness of a nation.

Those same words, spoken just 60-years ago in Mississippi resulted in people hanging from trees.

The petty tyrant acts harshest and swiftest when near the levers of power.  The clever, accomplished autocrat practices incrementalism and mutes his hunger with feigned benevolence.  What difference be it a despot, disease or dread, all render those afflicted with fear as dead from the neck up, either in fact or demeanor.

Would be dictators are using these times to tear at the fabric of America.  The deadliest virus here is tyranny and freedom the only vaccine.  Emma Goodman reminds use, “People have only as much liberty as they have the intelligence to want and the courage to take.” 

We are being lied to and worse, information is being kept from us.  The Chinese Communist Party, (CCP) is I believe, behind the creation of this virus.  Scientists say it was engineered in a laboratory in order to infect humans.  Virologists who study this have determined that the way in which the proteins attach to this virus could not have happened in nature.  The CCP cares nothing for human rights or human lives.  We need to understand that the CCP is our mortal enemy with designs to strangle us.  Until we accept that as fact, they will advance on their plans to overtake us.

Joe Biden is a CCP agent.  Via his position as Vice-President, he arranged for his son to be involved with managing billions of Chinese dollars in a deal that defies explanation other than to conclude a pay-to-play arrangement.  Biden is terminally compromised by the CCP.

The new, weak, masked and gloved America I’m seeing today doesn’t appear up to the task of maintaining our great heritage.  Many Americans seem unengaged or worse, uncaring.  Thomas Paine reminds us, “Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigues of supporting it.” 

We need to first, abandon China entirely and declare it an enemy-state, prohibiting any and all business dealings with them.  China cannot survive without America and we must allow the CCP to rot on the vine so the Chinese people can seize control of their country.  The CCP is trying to kill us.  We need to return the favor.

After the dust settles enough that we can escape the fog of war mentality that has overwhelmed some, we need to quickly identify those petty tyrants in local and state governments who were so quick to those levers of power and vanquish them from public life as unsuitable for the purposes of freedom.  At the highest levels of our national leadership, we need to coalesce around a common theme of the survival of the American story and the demise of the CCP.

I desperately hope that I am wrong when I look at today’s Americans and see weakness.  I hope that there are others who share my sense of disgust and disappointment and agree that we have to take back our destiny and determine our own paths.  Bob Marley said, “

“Better to die fighting for freedom then be a prisoner all the days of your life.”

This new time in America provides for us a jumping-off point for a revival of what made us great in our inception.  James Baldwin said, “Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be.”

 Do enough of us still cherish freedom as much as our founders did? 

Let us rededicate ourselves to America and to our freedoms as we maneuver around today’s petty tyrants and a climate of misinformation.  We do well remembering Henry David Thoreau’s famous words of inspiration.  “I was not born to be forced.  I will breathe after my own fashion.  Let us see who is the strongest.  Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.”  

We need to take back America now.  Napoleon said, “Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide.”  I pray to God for our country, and I pray we make the right decisions, closing with the beautiful words of Lord Byron, who said,   

“But words are things, and a small drop of ink,
falling, like dew, upon a thought produces
that which makes thousands, perhaps millions think.” 

I hope so.

Not only is freedom not free, it is painfully expensive.  When freedom is challenged, she can’t fight that assault without honorable and brave people coming to her defense.  Whatever challenges we face in defense of our freedom aren’t theoretic, esoteric or abstract, but real and often times exceedingly difficult.  The fight for freedom is noble because the success we attain in preserving it ripples through the landscape in defining and preserving it for others as well.  When we act bravely and nobly, we set down a marker that says anything less we will not tolerate.

Rosa Parks finally had enough on that fateful day in Montgomery, Alabama when she defied her antagonists on that city bus.  I’m sure she had no grand idea of becoming a national symbol for character and bravery.  James Bakke simply wanted his admission to medical school to be fairly considered.  When it was not, he sued the State of California.  He could not have known at the time that his story would ignite a national conversation about college admissions affirmative action programs, race and reverse-discrimination.  That unknown, unnamed man in Tiananmen Square in China, a noble army of one, defying a communist Chinese tank, impressing on the minds of billions of people the incredible courage of his convictions.  He was certainly not risking his very life as a publicity stunt.

These people and countless others have stood for the defense of freedom.  Why aren’t we?  Our founders pledged to each other, in words memorialized at the very end of the Declaration of Independence by writing the following:

“And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.”

These 56 men took that pledge in the name of freedom.  For their effort in the long bloody conflict that followed, five were captured, tortured and killed by the British. Twelve had their homes burned.  Many died widowed paupers. Two lost sons in the fighting, two more saw their sons captured. Nine of the 56 fought and died in the Revolutionary War.

The minute before those 56 brave men signed that document they were British subjects.  As soon as the ink dried on that declaration, they were American’s with a price on their heads, placed there by the largest and strongest empire and fighting force on the face of the Earth.  Are we worthy of that legacy of courage?  Is it right that we relish in the courage of yesterday while demonstrating none of the same today?

For our founders, it was the tyranny of England.  For Rosa Parks, the tyranny of the mob.  For the man in China, the tyranny of an ideology.  And for us today, the tyranny of our own fears.  But tyranny is tyranny, regardless of its origins and it must be expelled.

A healthy skepticism is a prerequisite to understanding people in power and what motivates them.  Erich Fromm warned us when he said, “Power on the one side, fear on the other, are always the buttresses on which irrational authority is built.”  We are seeing evidence of this today.

Governors compete to see who can tighten down the ratchet straps on people the hardest.  Officials encourage citizens to snitch on each other if someone is seen, “out of compliance.”  Local officials lecture about odd/even days of travel, according to your birthday.  Governors compete with the President to produce the best, live reality TV show, using fear to enlarge their stage and their ego.  Those huddled and hapless in their homes are bombarded with the same message, every 15 minutes on TV;

STAY AT HOME.  DON’T GO OUT.  FLATTEN THE CURVE.

America and American’s are not a one-size-fits-all commodity.  We are being lied to, not about everything, but about some things, in order to manage effectively our fear levels for the benefit of those who cherish the power over us.  Despots are using crisis to manage their political careers.  This is a test to determine just how much the average American will tolerate before they fight back.  So far the answer seems to be that American’s have forgotten how to fight.

Ghandi, of all people, sounded the alarm we would be wise to heed today.  “It is when power is wedded to chronic fear that it becomes formidable. … Where there is fear, there is power.”  Conversely, as John Maeda reminds us, “If you have no fear, no one has power over you.” 

Bingo.

It is time that we began to listen to that voice in our heads that we have been suppressing for weeks now, mistakenly yielding to the group-think, sky-is-falling siren song of the powerful icons of leadership and ignoring our own sensibilities.  Thomas Paine was right, and it ought to be as crystal clear now as it has ever been.

 “The strength and power of despotism consists wholly in the fear of resistance.”

Can you imagine those 56 brave men, the signators of our countries birth, huddled at home, doing nothing, waiting to be told what will happen next?  I don’t think so.

What in God’s holy name has happened to the spirit and backbone of this glorious country?  Those huddling at home under masks, gloves and blankets of fear deserve nothing the founders gave them.  Anais Nin got it right:  “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.”  The time is now to muster our own.

This Sunday we celebrate Easter, the most significant holiday in the Christian world.  Just as Christ was resurrected, let us too reform and rethink our American geneaology and resurrect our resolve, our fortitude, and our God-given obligations as individuals to think for ourselves and to recognize when we are being mislead and misguided.  I ask God Almighty for his intervention; not only to suppress this virus, but to relieve from us our own contagion of a lack of faith and a failing of our God-given responsibility to govern ourselves righteously and with honor and dignity.