The Real Fight for Freedom Isn’t About Masks

Andy Snyder|December 9, 2020

We’re not sure why we do these things to ourselves.

Perhaps it’s the idea that we’re miserable when we’re sitting still…

Perhaps it’s our way of exercising the quieter lobes of our brain after looking at charts and numbers all day.

Or perhaps we’re just stupid.

No matter. We hitched the trailer to the truck over the weekend and drove an hour north. We picked up a trio of sheep and five of their fall-born lambs.

Sorting our animals from the 200 or so in the flock wasn’t hard. It’s easy if you’ve done it a time or two.

But as we put the last ewe and her set of twins in the trailer, we noticed something wasn’t right.

The big brown sheep at the front of the trailer was butting one of the lambs.

It wasn’t hers.

Bad Assumptions

We were sure we caught the right one. It was black, with a white tip on its tail.

We shrugged our shoulders, pulled up our boots and went back into the flock to search for another. Suddenly, it was as if every other lamb was black with a white tip on its tail.

We grabbed one we thought could be the right fit.

Nope. The old ewe pushed it aside.

We did it again with another black sheep. Nope.

Finally, our brain warmed up enough to give us an idea. “Just start over,” the squishy, old organ called out. “Let the ewe loose in the flock and let her do the dirty work.”

We opened the trailer, swung open the corral gate and let her loose.

We reset the whole darn thing…

And like iron to a magnet, a six-week-old lamb came shooting out of the flock and latched on. Mother and son were together again.

We grabbed ’em up, and off we went.

It’s amazing how things like that work.

The Real World

Now, here’s where a lesser-yeared writer might turn the corner and say, “Back in the real world… the news wasn’t as good.”

But are our calluses so thick and is our sense of reality so warped that we think a young lamb using some sort of heavenly magic to find his mother isn’t the “real world”?

Are we so blinded by the glitz of the day that what’s real and what’s right feel out of place and out of the ordinary – like natural life is some sort of fantasy land that we can leave in the rearview mirror as we head back to the land of city streets and shipping containers?

Perhaps that’s why we struggle with sheep. They make sure there’s always a trailerload of reality in the rearview mirror.

We need that… because back here in the land of altered reality, things are getting odd.

We came home to reports that the police in England are now using high-tech license plate readers to see who’s wandered where they don’t belong.

You see… over there, the grass may not be greener on the other side of the fence, but the beer is.

Thanks to COVID-19, England is divided into a system of tiers. Folks living in Tier 3, for example, don’t have quite the luxuries of the oh-so-lucky folks in Tier 2.

When there are a hundred miles between a guy and the next tier, it’s a bit of a downer. There’s not much he can do about it. But when the barrier between a fella and his pint is just a few miles, it’s worth sticking his neck out.

But the law doesn’t like it…

“It is neither necessary or acceptable to leave a Tier 3 area and enter a lower tier area for a day trip or to visit a pub or restaurant for a meal,” said North Yorkshire Police Superintendent Mike Walker.

“Please also be reminded that your tier restrictions travel with you and police can take enforcement action against you, if you should breach those restrictions.”

We’ve found that an electric fence sparking with 7,000 volts keeps our sheep where they need to be.

Perhaps that’s what’s coming to a town near you next.

When One Becomes Many

In a world that only likes to hear its own voice, we bring this up not to toss out another lousy opinion… but to offer a warning.

We’re going to eat our sheep someday.

And what good would a few miles of electric fence, feeders, gates and all the other necessities do us if we didn’t shuffle one set out and another in?

We’ve got the gear, right? We might as well use it.

Golly, do you think the same could happen anywhere else?

Will the health department furlough its staff until the next pandemic?

Will the police suddenly shut off their license plate readers?

Will the government tell us that we must spend our money in our own tier… you know, just until it catches up with the rich buggers in Tier 3?

We fear now that our rulers have gotten into the business of telling us which business can open and which cannot, they’ll grow fond of their powers.

They won’t let a lowly vaccine take away what they’ve got.

Beating the bad guys in the Mideast three or four times now hasn’t slowed the TSA or the Department of Homeland Security (two agencies born after the 2001 attacks).

And now that most of the troops are back home, we’re not tossing out their weapons. Nah, we’re giving them to the police so they can dress like soldiers as they pull us over.

Why waste a good opportunity to build a better fence around the sheep, right?

All this economic manipulation and freedom curbing are for a fair cause now. But what comes next?

That’s where the real battle lies.

Will our gatekeepers open the door and let nature sort things out? Will they reset things, releasing the captured ewe to let it find its orphaned lamb? Or will they continue to keep the fence hot and tell us what’s best?

The good, natural human spirit makes us yearn for one thing.

History tells us to expect another.

Student loan forgiveness leads to an addiction to stimulus, which leads to the death of cash… and suddenly we’re watching the nightly news to see what our keepers have to say about our economic future.

The real fight for freedom doesn’t come during the emergency. It comes when the emergency is gone.

Our business and our fight are in the unnatural realm of money.

The scary fact is the upward movement of money has never been swifter. The raging stock market is proof.

The unprepared or the folks too timid to do what they know they must have no idea what’s ahead or how large of a battle it will be to regain some semblance of economic freedom – i.e., living in a nation where the Treasury doesn’t control our fate, the Fed doesn’t print away our wealth and the taxman can’t steal our work in the name of the “greater good.”

Again, will our gatekeepers pull down what they built in 2020 and let things get back to normal when this is all done?

We have our doubts.

Sheep don’t need much freedom.

P.S. Our money is one of our greatest economic freedoms. To learn what a meeting next week could mean for the fate of physical money in America… click here. December 16 could be devastating for unprepared Americans. Details are here.

Are you worried that the pandemic will lead to long-lasting limits on our freedoms? Share your thoughts at mailbag@manwardpress.com.