OF ANTS AND MEN

                          OF ANTS AND MEN

-

     The war we're fighting is a war between ants and Men. 

     Ants scurry about their world at random in great numbers, 

leaving behind long sticky trails of pheromone, chemically 

commanding anyone and everyone, "DO THIS! DO THAT! GO HERE! GO 

THERE! EAT! SLEEP! WORK! FIGHT! DIE!"  

     The pheremone trails build up, one upon another, lapping, 

overlapping, tracing, back-tracing, up, down, sideways, overlay 

on grimy overlay, imperative after foul imperative, until the 

whole ant-world lies cloyed and covered in tarry, reeking, 

imperious filth. 

     Men speak, and as the words die cleanly in the air between 

them, they think about the words and speak anew. The surrounding 

environment of will, of choice, and of motivation is unpolluted. 

Their decisions, agreements, judgments, options, alternatives, 

preferences remain inside them, inside their individual minds. 

They do not clutter and befoul the physical space in which they 

all must live. 

     Ants cannot live like Men and more importantly, men cannot 

live like ants. Yet that's precisely what we've been trying to 

do. For two centuries, ten generations, we've endured ant-like 

accumulations of obsolete, discredited commands, ordinances, 

statutes, and decrees building up beneath our feet, slowing us, 

binding us, gluing us down like so much gum lying gooey on a 

sidewalk at high noon. 

     Keeping us from being what we might have been. 

     Keeping us impoverished, hungry, and stultified. 

     Keeping us from the one true destiny of Men, the stars. 

     As we've been told so often -- by those who wish to live 

like ants -- it's time to clean up the environment. To decide 

that we are Men, not ants. 

     Twenty years ago, when I first began pondering this subject, 

there were FIVE MILLION FEDERAL LAWS (and ignorance, I'd remind 

you, of the law is no excuse). Who knows how many now? Who knows 

how many state, county, and city laws? Who knows what they cost 

us -- besides our future. 

     The Founding Fathers never meant the nation's legislatures 

to become full-time pheromone-factories. There's evidence that 

they envisioned Congress and the state assemblies as places Men 

would meet -- occasionally -- to deal with some emergency. And 

even then they may have been wrong. They must have been wrong, or 

we wouldn't be suffering all this clutter, this legislative 

pollution today. 

     I propose a Moratorium, a final Law, an Amendment to the 

Constitution creating a 100-year prohibition on legislative 

activity of any kind within the borders of the United States of 

America, during which the only thing a legislature could do would 

be to REPEAL old laws, mop up all the pheromones, clean up the 

environment. 

     Those who wish to live like ants, and they are many, will 

fight it, shrieking that they won't know what to do without their 

little sticky overlapping trails (desperately afraid, too, that 

they won't be able to tell others what to do any more) and won't 

know how to live. 

     Those who want to live like Men will champion it. 

     And in that Century of Sanity, they will reach the stars. 

-

L. Neil Smith

Author:  THE PROBABILITY BROACH, THE CRYSTAL EMPIRE, 

HENRY MARTYN, and (forthcoming) PALLAS

LEVER ACTION BBS (303) 493-6674, FIDOnet: 1:306/31.4

Libertarian Second Amendment Caucus

NRA Life Member