Spheres: Personal & Political

I was watching some video from Reason this morning, a presentation by two school choice activists pointing out how much progress has been made. These types of presentations are the same sort that got me interested in politics in the first place; they give you the great idea that you can make some sort of difference, and you can, until your opponents figure out how to thwart you. We win, for real, when the entire question of education is removed from the political sphere. We win when almost all questions are removed from the political sphere, because most questions are personal, and therefore are properly addressed in our personal spheres, even if they are somehow public.

We saw what the personal can do, even when it is public, when Kate and Will went and got married. Politicians are especially attuned to this sort of thing, and it is no wonder they grumbled; despite all their public relations bills and their actual power, they can't muster half that crowd. I have hopes that perhaps some of the many young women who tuned in might have heard about a god who actually wants people to have children. I also hope that, maybe, upon seeing a wedding to a real prince, they might think twice about slumming with thugs and getting tattoos. At the very least, I do hope Kate's dress is replicated early and often- thank you ever so much for wearing sleeves.

But there I go proving my point. There is no guarantee of policy, there is no policy, it's personal. The effects are highly personal, certainly of lasting importance to the participants, but also of some uncertain level of importance to anyone paying attention. We can't, despite all our 'glorious' wars everywhere across the globe, even pretend to manufacture the sort of patriotism enjoyed by those who feel some sort of allegiance to the royal family.

Back in the land where everything is political, including the personal, the president has released something related to a birth certificate, and has authorized the murder of someone who may or may not be Osama bin Laden. Obama is on the campaign trail, and he's framing the debate. While the strategic superiority of Osama's strategy should be obvious for all to see, Obama has just employed a bit of theater in order to pretend he is the winner in the war on terror. Odious, is it not, that in order to do this they murdered somebody and threw him in the sea? Why didn't they do the whole show trial thing?

I shouldn't be surprised. Our toilets are legislated in this pathetic country. The birth certificate, to the protestant minded folk who like to think they can read the document and hold all parties to whatever they think it says, is like red meat to a guard dog; while ya'll are tearing that one apart they'll be in the house, stealing us blind.

Well, I feel like I digressed, seeing as I have embarked on a discussion of current events, but perhaps I did not digress, for they are examples of cheap political theater involving a false person. If these false people, these politicians, were removed from decisions making, if all decisions were personal, we'd be better off. Our real fight isn't to get the bureaucrats to do what we want, but to remove them, where ever possible, from the spheres of decision making that are rightfully ours.