I don't think of it as compromise. I mean, we declaw the government, put it back in its cage, what have we compromised? We had to work with some people who don't agree with us on everything? So what? Hey, we don't agree with each other on everything, as if that's a news flash.
Yeah, we've just been spending way too much energy sweating the small stuff that we differ on and ignoring all the big stuff that we agree on.
There are throngs of people who love liberty, who hate what the government has become, but don't know how to fight it. They feel like they are part of the system because they are trapped in it. They are ready to do something about it, buy they don't know what. They look around and don't see a cause to rally behind, they're hesitant to believe in something good because the world they live in has taught them to be cynical. My friends, there are a lot more than 20,000 people who are ready for something like the fsp. All we have to do is light the lamp!
The people to whom I refer are not the philosophical elite. They are the salt of the earth, they are the regular folks who live and work and pay their mortgage and their taxes and they see their pay stub every week and shake their head, and maybe they've tried their hand in small business and found out how high the deck is stacked against them.
They haven't read In Defense of Elitism, or The Libertarian Reader. They aren't fluent in politicalspeak. But dammit, they're not stupid, either. They know what's what and they know how to get stuff done in the real world.
We don't have to compromise with these people. We just have to show them what's possible. They just need us to give them what they go to bed every night thinking about -- something to believe in. Well, we've already got that. We just need to present it in the right way.
I admit, when I first came to the fsp website, I was a little overwhelmed. There is such an incredible depth of information, and it was on a subject I'd never really studied before. Thank God I found the summary description and the SOI and the faq.
We don't have to compromise. We just have to realize that we're reaching out to largely unindoctrinated minds.
Take it from me, sometimes the undereducated can be really good activists.