By the waters of Babylon

There was this country, once. Magnificent place. It was the only country ever started on a premise, that all of its citizens owned their own lives. Extraordinary. No one belonged to a king or a lord or a factory manager. No beadle could tell you where to stand or live or what to say and do. In fact, this country's charter listed what it could not do- could not make you shut up, could not take away your weapons, could not take your property. As long as you followed the natural law, everything else was open. Freedom, real freedom.

Now, not everybody bought into this. There was a group that held its self-regard as more important than the country. Those people defined freedom as getting to do whatever they wanted to do whenever they felt like it with absolutely no one else objecting, but no one else could do anything unless they personally approved. That's not freedom, and the country ended up in a civil war because those idiots actually wanted to hold slaves. Slaves! In a free country! Well, the free ones took care of that, and took care of the selfish and the criminal and the lustful, too. Justice was pretty swift back then because justice was known. And, after awhile, things got pretty good.

Country like that draws enemies, powerful ones that still loved kings and telling their people where to stand and what to think and what to do, and there were some hellacious wars. Any other country would have been overrun, but these people, something about them. They loved their freedom, their natural law, and they were willing to die for it. In fact, they sailed to other countries and willingly died to free strangers. No one had ever done that before. Hurt people all over the world looked at that country and saw a shining city on a hill and they came in droves, sometimes hiding out in ships or airplane wheelwells to get there.

But, people are people. And there is that nature that still wants to tell other people what to do. Turns out a magnificent country requires a rigorous, tough minded citizenry and, well, they only last so long. One generation went through an unbelievable economic collapse followed by an even more unbelievable world war and they said to their children, "Never again." So their children faced no challenges and never grew up and didn't like rigor or tough-mindedness and said there was no truth and there was no God so there was nothing that prevented them from having as good a time as they wanted. That included telling others what to do because it made them feel noble and good and better than the ones being told.

Pretty soon, it was no longer a magnificent country. Sweet speaking demagogues, promising unicorns and flowers, were raised as kings, and the people fell on their knees with clasped hands and bright smiles and tears on their cheeks in anticipation of bounty and favor.

And on their knees they stayed.