Fatiguing us into compliance

Katie van Schaijik | Oct 23, 2010

I must have sent some money somewhere along the line to Senator Jim DeMint, because the other day I received in the mail a “Freedom Fighter” T-shirt, some bumper stickers, and a book of his called, Saving Freedom: We can stop America’s slide into socialism.

I picked it up in a desultory mode this afternoon and found that it opens with the full text of The Declaration of Independence.

I read it as if for the first time. (Quite possibly it was the first time.)

One item in the “long train of abuses and usurpations” committed by the King and detailed by the signers particularly caught my attention:

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

When we are tired and out of sorts, we are apt to comply with our own diminishment as persons. Like Esau selling his birthright for some stew. Weariness weakens the will. So does being displaced.

Is it not ironic that the same time and culture that places such a high premium on individual rights and personal liberty seems by its chronic rootlessness, instability and alienation to set us up for serfdom?