Individuality, Liberty, and Human Dignity - Exclusive

Individuality, Liberty, and Human Dignity

By R.J. Godlewski
©August 10, 2007, All Rights Reserved

History has always been kind to individuals and perhaps rightfully so. Some of the most significant features of the human race have been orchestrated by singular people with uncommon determination, faith, and knowledge. People who we know instantly by the recitation of a simple name: Tutankhamen, Cleopatra, Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, Michelangelo, Lincoln, Lindbergh, Churchill, MacArthur, Elvis, Reagan. Mention any of these names and just about everyone will know precisely whom you are referencing. Occasionally, history takes a slight bump in its path; a momentary detour of sorts where ‘groups’ become significant in of themselves. The Beatles and the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team come immediately to mind. Still, these are largely known for the sum of their parts – the groups have become a surrogate for individualism – and once fractured, their significance fades quickly.

The Beatles drifted into history when their uniqueness ended as soon as the four musicians decided to become real individuals and despite constant comparisons, there will never be a greater sports upset than when a gang of young American kids defeated the Soviet’s veteran Red juggernaut. Few of today’s generation can name the participants of either group. So as nature follows the path of least resistance, it is always the individual who reigns supreme. Louis Pasteur helped make the world safe from disease. Mother Theresa helped make the world safe from poverty. Albert Einstein helped make everything relative. The list of examples could go on for as long as people exist. So, too, could the effort of some who desire to use groups to enslave, control, or exterminate the individual.

Adolf Hitler used national socialism in an attempt to eradicate Jews. Josef Stalin used communist totalitarianism in an attempt to eradicate religion and dissidence. Osama Bin Laden developed a perverted view of Islam in an attempt to eradicate Israel and Western democracies and freedom. Whereas each of these examples targeted masses, their primary objective was the termination of a specific individual. Whether being a Jew, a capitalist, or a Christian is the ultimate infraction, you are simply being targeted for what you believe and not so much the transitory group that you think that you belong to. To avoid this reality, both sides are descending into clumps of organizations which are designed specifically to protect through association of like-minded groups. In short, to survive we are destroying the very individualism that makes us human.

This disgrace is evident as soon as we introduce someone – perhaps a girlfriend, a boyfriend, or a spouse – to a friend. Almost always the first question asked is one of “What do you do? as opposed to “Who are you?” We are more concerned about what the individual is instead of who they are as a person. Even in today’s enlightened age, we are not much better than we were well before ‘civilization’ took effect. We watch the news and find out that Denzel Washington became the first black man to win an Oscar. That Sally Ride became the first American woman to go into space. That Hillary Clinton may become the first woman president or that Barack Obama may become the first black president in U.S. history. Does it matter to us precisely what they are?

Take myself, as an example. I am an American and a Roman Catholic. So what does that make me? For starters, being an American means that I belong to a group of some three hundred million people. As a Roman Catholic, it means that I subscribe to a belief that is shared by some one billion other souls living today on this planet. Not particularly unique when you get right down to it. I mean, my ‘groups’ represent about 22% of the U.S. population and at least 15% of the global population. Pretty tight company. Well, that’s what I am. Now, if you were to ask who I am, then things can get a little more specific. I’m R.J. Godlewski and I represent a singular example from a stock of nearly seven billion people out there. For those statisticians out there, that means that I’m literally a one in six and an half (soon to be seven, eight, nine…) billion representative of the human species. Whether you like me or not, you won’t find another one like me anywhere in the universe!

As an individual, which is, after all, what this article is all about, I’m a complex, diversified, and evolving character. I take an immense interest in all things that I observe. I contemplate all things that I consider. I treasure all people that I know. Yes, I even value my enemies – within reason – for without them the act of choosing between Good and Evil would be no chore at all. I am not definable; one moment I may be directing my talents in commercial diving, at another I may be seeking methods of colonizing space. Lying open or page marked within reach are texts on marine engineering, ancient Egypt, narratives on Muslim Jihadists, several issues of Armed Forces Journal and C4ISR: The Journal of Net-Centric Warfare, a thick reference on advanced organic chemistry, a thinner text on the fundamentals of nuclear engineering and, of course, my Bible. This quick list does not include the thirty or forty books stacked around me that I cannot spot the titles for at the moment, but you can rest assured they are not placed away for I always count on them for knowledge. This last tidbit, you should very much understand, emphasizes my status as a changing creature. What I’ve read today may not be what I’m required to read tomorrow and that makes me something of a ‘knowledge chameleon’. In other words, an individual.

So why, exactly, have I discussed myself in these terms? Because I feel that today, our society and, specifically, our political and academic establishments have begun to eradicate the concept of the individual from our ranks and are determined to replace them – us – with their own variants of groups. Don’t believe me? Well, then, just sit back and permit me to run off a quick litany of examples:

ABORTIONS: This is probably the most serious of the cases to be discussed and represents my personal crusade. Those who support abortions don’t see individuals, they merely see inconveniences; threats to a mother’s health and welfare (show me a mother who wouldn’t do everything to save the life of their child and I’ll show you someone who treats the term without care); and, especially, simple fetuses. Anything but a living human baby. Myself? I do see individuals. I see potential scientists, engineers, doctors, teachers, astronauts, welders, archaeologists, business executives, librarians, truck drivers, fishermen, scuba divers, musicians, novelists… With over 35 million souls lost to this abomination, I could come up with every career or job classification on the damn planet. So why don’t the proponents of abortion see what I see? Because they know that if they treated the unborn as human individuals, they’d lose their ability to undertake abortions. If there are no individuals – in other words, no humans – there’s nothing wrong with terminating them.

ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS: Here’s another blanket term that shows how much those with a particular agenda want to destroy individualism. I see someone who sneaks across the border, hides within our communities, and partakes of our benefits without concern for our laws as an individual who has broken the law. Now, mind you, I don’t think that they are always drug runners, terrorists, thieves and the like, but we just don’t know. One thing is for certain, however, these individuals – with just cause or not – have intentionally chosen to circumvent our laws in order to enter the United States and that, my friends, makes them criminals (“Ignorance of the law is no excuse”). Activists for the illegal immigrants don’t see individuals. They see groups of undocumented aliens. They can’t individualize because there is safety – meaning, protection of their particular agenda – in numbers. Twelve million individuals means there just might be terrorists, rapists, and murderers amongst them. One very large group of ‘undocumented aliens’ means there is a substantial block of like-minded people who are mostly decent people seeking a decent living. We can therefore forget about the ten percent that murder our children, rob our homes, and sabotage our legal system because it is only “a very small fraction”. As individuals, it would be known that there would be over one million terrorists, rapists, and murderers here in America. I also object to the term ‘undocumented alien’; it sounds too much like me being without a college degree or something. Do we intend to hand out antique parchment certificates for illegal aliens bestowing upon them the ‘degree’ of citizen? I have a document for them – it’s called the Miranda Rights card.

WORKERS: You might think that our workforce cannot be grouped into one or two classifications and you would be wrong. Sure, we have programmers, truck drivers, bank tellers, pro athletes, etc. but liberals do not see it that way. They, instead, see one of three groups – employed, underemployed, and the unemployed. The first group is simply a tax base for them. The second a target for income redistribution. The third is a target for social welfare programs. That there exists a fourth group – the self-employed – does not matter to them for their policies are to eliminate these individuals completely. No longer is an individual required to keep abreast of their industry, maintain high work standards, and show up for work on a daily basis. They have been given an opportunity to fit into one of the foregoing groups and neatly hide away from societal scrutiny. It also gives the liberal left an avenue to control the workforce through the next identifier.

EDUCATION: This one really infuriates me. I have yet to meet someone who came straight out of a school and wasn’t ‘re-trained’ by their employer. Henceforth I see two reasons that one attends post-secondary schools: 1.) to party away from home and 2.) to spend tens of thousands of dollars on what can be had for the price of a library card as so stated by the character Will in Good Will Hunting. This might be simplifying the matter a bit, but we must consider that those who seek groups at the expense of individuals need to make higher education mandatory. A degree in art history or music is an absolute must for a successful manager! Oh really? I think that college should be left for the engineering and science disciplines. After all, we don’t want self-taught neurologists, right? That’s where individualism comes into play. We define each person’s needs by their own requirements. Throwing a blanket over everything and saying that everyone needs an expensive degree in any field so long as they attend universities taught by – you guessed it! – liberal professors simply ignores the fact that some of the most successful people in the world are self-taught individuals. Bill Gates, Louis L’Amour, Abraham Lincoln, former British Prime Minister John Major, Florence Nightingale, and Chuck Yeager are widely diverse people in my book, but definitely don’t belong within the all-encompassing group known as ‘uneducated’ by the academic elite. Individuals learn; groups are taught.

MARRIAGES: One would think that I couldn’t find a problem with this classification, but they just don’t seem to realize that I’m an individualist. ;o) I see marriage as two individuals – a man and a women – combining in love to become a third ‘individual’ so that they could create and raise more individuals. This is the way that it has worked for ten thousand years. Not sufficient say the group-creating liberals! Married persons must also be an all-encompassing group catering to no specific individuals. This means forget the mother-father relationship; now you can have mother-mother, father-father, single-mother, single-father, multiple-fathers with one mother, multiple-mothers with one father, etc. Whew! Before you know it, there’ll be one big massive wedding where all six billion people on the planet will be married to everyone else and individual weddings will go the way of the dodo and society in general.

By now, I hope, you’ve begun to realized just how endangered a species the ‘individual’ is within our culture. If you don’t belong, you simply don’t exist. It makes no difference if you consider yourself a patriotic American and a God-fearing person because, unfortunately, the global community is one group and religion is a catchall phrase to mean a person’s inner beliefs. So when you say, as in my case, that you’re a proud Roman Catholic, it also means that you’re a proud Muslim, a proud Hindu, a proud Druid, even a proud atheist for that matter. If I boast to being a red-blooded American, they mean for you to realize that everyone within the New World are Americans too, for they reside within Central and South America as well as our blood brothers in Canada and Mexico who share the Northern continent with us.

So there you have it! A five page testament to the Great World Group in which we all belong. No matter what we do, we belong to others. They share what we have and we share what they give us. We don’t exist, but we are here nonetheless. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, among others, know this intuitively as you can tell from their association with the World Group Managers. Of course, all of this is a pile of dodo shit in my book, but what do I know? I’m only an individual. ;o)

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