As many of you probably know, we Kansans had us some rains yesterday.  “Torrential” is a word overused in this situation, but this was the kind of rain where, if you were caught out in it, you would have to keep your face pointed down in order to breath.  It looked as if someone were continuously pouring 55-gallon drums of water over everything.

This afternoon I heard of one Topekan who came home from work to find every bit of cedar mulch from his front yard was gone — from the flower beds, from around the trees, all of it — washed down the driveway, into the street, into the gutter, down the storm drain.  All gone.

He let himself into his house and walked out to his patio.  There were five bags of cedar mulch, washed into his back yard from somebody else’s landscaping project.

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Once upon a time there was a marine biologist who developed a group of porpoises which would live forever if they were fed a diet of a specific seagull.

Everything was going along well (swimmingly?), until he ran out of seagulls.

So he walked down to the beach, found the birds he was looking for, harvested some of them, and put them in a bag.  He was carrying them back up to the lab when he came across two lions sleeping in the path.

Not wanting to wake them, he began tiptoeing carefully across them.  Of course, he was immediately arrested for transporting gulls across sedate lions for immortal porpoises.

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“The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.”

– George Bernard Shaw

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A few days ago I was asked if I find it depressing to belong to a political party that just doesn’t have a chance of winning the election.  The person who asked, of course, was talking about the presidential race.  Libertarians do, in fact, win a number of local positions, and even an occasional state-wide seat, but I knew exactly what she meant.

The question brought me up short, because I had never thought of it that way.  Discouraging sometimes, yes.  Libertarians are really good at sitting around discussing theory.  Heck, so am I.  We LOVE to tell each other over and over all the things that are wrong with the way things are being done, and how it would be done differently if we were in charge, as we should be.  But sometimes we’re not so good at gathering signatures and handing out literature and running for office and speaking up at City Council meetings and protesting eminent domain abuse.  Me neither.  And, yes, sometimes I do get discouraged trying to motivate the people in my little local group to actually do something.  There have been a number of people who came to a meeting or two, then never returned after they were asked to be treasurer or greet new people at the next meeting.  I feel bad about that.

But depressing?  No.

The best analogy I can come up with is this:  I think I feel about this movement the same way the early Christian churches must have felt.  Yes, we’re a tiny group facing overwhelmingly large opposition.  Yes, a big portion of the society we live in thinks we’re strange at best, dangerous at worst.  Yes, there are rampant distortions of our message out there, and they harm our cause.

But.  We’re.  Just.  So.  Darn.  Sure.  We’re.  Right.  Giving up is not an option.

Okay, I admit my life is not in danger because of my political beliefs.  (Probably.)  And nobody has accused me of killing babies or of being a cannibal, as I understand was the case for Christians in first century Rome.

I also admit the early Christian churches were convinced that the end of the world was imminent, so they were not particularly concerned with a message that would resonate through the ages.  The Libertarian message, by contrast, will be more obviously right AFTER the collapse of the economic world as we know it.

So, am I depressed?  No.  I’m doing something I believe is worthwhile, something I see as hopeful and helpful to everyone out there.  I don’t know whether I will see the results, but I will always know that I fought for something, and that I stood for something.

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