What's Wrong With This Picture?

There goes the ACLU protecting criminals and terrorists rights to "express" themselves by victimizing the majority of citizens asking for safety and security against the few who have no respect and regard for the rights of others. That's why they have to have these restrictions -- to protect the innocent, and not the guilty -- although admittedly, the latter would be the best arrangement to provide permanent job security for lawyers, emergency personnel, security, criminals, politicians.

But like so many other "professionals," they need to look beyond their own narrow self-interests to the greater good of the community -- in which safety must always trump freedom, especially when the ruthless interpret those freedoms as the right to terrorize and intimidate the weak and innocent.

I know that not discriminating between criminal activity and lawful, respectful, productive behavior is a cherished, inalienable right of Hawaii, but we need laws that make sense and protect the innocent.

Otherwise, as we're coming to realize, the good people go away (because they can), and only the criminals and weak are left -- to realize their sense of urgency and desperation, that they have to make their own stand against the personalities and forces that persecute and torment them. That is why, periodically throughout history, there is a revolt against the historical pattern, onto quite a different path -- because human civilization does not devolve, but must evolve to a higher level or it perishes, as the extinct and forgotten have done so more often than not.

Life is reserved for the winners -- who have figured out a way to make life better for themselves and as many others as their present technologies and understanding make possible. If that societal vision makes life better only for a smaller few, then its intentions and fate, have been well-established and determined to be unsustainable.

A smaller and smaller circle ensures that the greater talent and ability will be locked out -- on the other side, leading the war against them. That is the fatal mistake of every society that has failed before, and the secret of success to those civilizations that now flourish and are successful at recruiting talent and ability to their side, to their cause -- with themselves invariably at the top, and intending to remain so forever.

That realization is the awakening from innocence -- of having the world made for one and finding one's proper place in it, or establishing a new world that one assumes the responsibility of creating -- which is the act of liberation, and not just enjoying the freedoms "given" to one, as the only ones that can be. A true and greater freedom, is the liberation from even those few "freedoms" of the past -- that are now recognized as the barriers and hindrances they were.

One assumes those responsibilities when one is ready to -- and cannot before. In such a world, lawyers, judges and arbitrators determine for everyone else, what is justice and social good -- rather than everybody, doing it for themselves, and enjoying that exercise of human actualization not even thought possible before.