If you celebrate Christmas someplace cold this year, step outside after dark that night without a coat. No hat, scarf or gloves, either: just the shirt or sweater you were wearing indoors. Feel the wind’s needles stinging your face and hands? It won’t take long for your fingers to go numb. And you quickly learn that a shirt or even a sweater doesn’t begin to protect you from the elements. You’re severely and uncontrollably shivering within a few minutes.
Now remove your shoes and socks. Take a few steps in the snow. How far could you walk like this? Have you ever before been so physically miserable?
But unless your clothes are mere rags, full of holes, you’re more warmly dressed than virtually any of the 2400 Continental soldiers marching under General George Washington this night in 1776 — “and all the time a constant fall of snow with some rain,” according to Elisha Bostwick of the Seventh Connecticut Regiment.
He and his fellows are heading for Trenton, New Jersey, where 1500 German allies of the British Army are snoring off their Christmas punch. Before the night’s done, the Continentals will have marked the route with bloody footprints where the ice and the road’s frozen ruts slice their feet.
One of General Washington’s aides records in his journal, “Christmas, 6PM … It is fearfully cold and a snowstorm setting in. The wind is northeast and beats in the faces of the men. It will be a terrible night for the soldiers who have no shoes. Some of them have tied old rags around their feet; others are barefoot….”
At last they collapse into boats for their infamous trip across the Delaware River. The spray and splashing soak them, adding to their agony. “The floating ice in the river made the labor almost incredible,” wrote General of Artillery Henry Knox to his wife. Nonetheless, he and his troops transported “eighteen field-pieces” through that storm and over that river: cannon made from brass or iron and weighing as much as a ton apiece.
More hiking through the blizzard to Trenton rewards this tortured crossing. “The night was cold and stormy,” Knox continued, “it hailed with great violence; the troops marched with the most profound silence…”
After their sleepless, exhausting, utterly wretched night, they attack the Hessians that morning and capture 900 of them. Only two Continentals die for this triumph — on the march, not in the battle.
I cannot comprehend the staggering sacrifices these men made for liberty — and then I contrast their suffering with the excuses and outrage from their descendants at the idea of — gasp — driving instead of flying.
“But — but — are you seriously suggesting, why, that’d take hours, and with the kids, I mean, come on, flying is so much easier, we have to fly, you don’t understand.”
Just ask “Daniel Anderson, 28, of Alexandria,” Virginia, who “was preparing to board a flight at Reagan National Airport with his wife and 20-month-old daughter, Alexa” at Thanksgiving. “ ‘We gotta get to Grandma’s,’ he said as Alexa held an Elmo doll in the security line. ‘The choice is to have her microwaved or felt up, but we gotta get to Grandma’s, so we’ll do it.’ ”
Why? Is family so dear or the holiday so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? “Yep,” say far too many Americans. “We gotta get to Grandma’s/the annual meeting/the client/our honeymoon in Hawaii/Aruba for our vacation.”
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) presents one of the most dangerous and certainly the most obscene threat to liberty in all history. Never before has any regime anywhere, no matter how brutal or despotic, routinely irradiated and sexually assaulted its citizens. Yet astoundingly, tragically, 2 million Americans promote their own subjugation each day, purchasing seats on commercial flights without concern that they thereby forge another link in their chains.
Other Americans have loudly and vehemently protested the TSA’s abuse. But their cries fall on deaf ears as the agency insists that fighting terrorism requires its thugs to grope between our legs.
Nor does Congress listen. These sociopaths not only “oversee” the TSA’s atrocities, they could have disbanded it at any time over the nine years of its existence by simply voting “no” to its budget. But they haven’t. Nor will they. Too much money flows to too many of their corporate cronies.
Instead, they offer scams like Rep. John Mica’s (R-FL) “privatization,” in which airports hire “private” screeners who will molest and ogle us just as the TSA does. That’s because the agency will still exist, still set policies, still enforce its unconscionable and anti-Constitutional searches: “contractors must follow all TSA-mandated security procedures, including hand pat-downs when necessary.”
So the only way to overthrow this unprecedented tyranny is to boycott commercial aviation. Airlines facing bankruptcy will compel Congress to abolish the TSA. And not a moment too soon: the agency is extending its groping and ogling from aviation to all forms of transportation.
Shutting down the TSA is absolutely essential for liberty. We will otherwise languish under a full-blown police-state, with government’s myrmidons violating and humiliating us as they please, any time, anywhere. Soon a drive to the mall could entail the TSA’s goons “detaining” your 15-year-old daughter when they stop your car at the parking lot’s entrance. You object as two of them push her into the checkpoint’s booth; two more threaten you with arrest when you step out of your car to follow her. “Git back inside there, and shut up, you know what’s good for you,” one snarls. “She be out once they finish wid her.”
Fortunately, defeating the TSA is far simpler than battling the government’s other fascism, such as Obamacare or the Federal Reserve: simply refuse to buy another airline ticket. That’s something a passenger’s dignity and self-respect ought to prevent in the first place. And yet … Grandma’s strudel beckons, the client’s ready to sign a million-dollar contract, the resort’s offering rooms at half-off this week.
Despite the Continentals’ rags and bare feet, Washington’s aide had “not heard a man complain. They are ready to suffer any hardship and die rather than give up their liberty.”
How things change.
