A Year To Wake Up!

by Karen Kwiatkowski
Jan. 09, 2012

It’s always a gamble to make predictions. I’ve had the benefit of seeing the 2012 predictions of the greats, and so far they don’t bode well. Marc Faber is not excited about our prospects for prosperity. Chris Mortenson and Gerald Celente and Richard Russell are also concerned. My sense is that 2012 will be a year of learning, of realizing, of waking up. My predictions are as follows:

2012 will be a bad year for rats. Technocrats, bureaucrats, kleptocrats and other central planners of the superfamily Muroidae will be rightfully credited for the persistent global economic and political malaise. People around the world will ever more rapidly recognize – and dislike, disdain, and hold in contempt – the ‘rats that plague us. Whether the tax-eating voles of municipal governments, the hamsters and pouched rats of state government, rattus norvegicus in D.C. or the New World Order lemmings, members of the ‘rat family will be increasingly viewed negatively. Ways to avoid the ‘rat, to starve the ‘rat, disrupt the breeding cycle and nest-building activities of the ‘rat, and to recover from ‘rat-bites will dominate the airwaves and the Internet. ‘Rats themselves will become more cautious and avoid publicity, while storing food and attempting to reinforce their most important nesting and feeding areas. Reports and viral videos of aggressive ‘rats will increase in 2012, even as Americans and others successfully avoid and in some cases, eliminate ‘rat centers of control.

2012 will be a bad year for a good old-fashioned D.C.-devised war. As governments everywhere go bankrupt, print money, and fail to deliver the goods domestically, historians will justifiably predict war. In previous eras, the wars associated with the collapse of empires arrived as apocalyptic and mysterious surprises to the people. But in 2012, the serfs have Internet. The young people are not loyal to the nation-state, and often see politicians and state employees as self-serving, arrogant, and parasitical. If educated by them, they’ve learned to hold the state authorities in contempt. If educated outside of the state, they’ve adopted a classical liberalism that doesn’t trust or believe in central state apparatchiks. Of those who do not fight our wars, the old are embarrassed at what has been already wasted, and have lost enthusiasm for war. The middle-aged are frightened and confused, feeling the financial pinch. It won’t be easy to march to war with other countries, and even another Pearl Harbor or 9/11 style event won’t be enough, not after what veterans and citizens alike have learned from Washington’s failed and costly occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

2012 will be a year of progress towards truly free markets, sound money, and government so small you can drown it in a bathtub. Knowledge of and respect for liberty is growing. Every day, more Americans understand how liberty functions in a society, and they embrace self-ownership, sound money and limited government as working to secure that liberty. Some of this knowledge comes through teachers like Ron Paul, Tom Woods, Judge Napolitano, sites like Lewrockwell.com, the Future of Freedom Foundation, and the Foundation for Economic Education, and hundreds of other organizations dedicated to classical liberalism, free-market economics, limited or even no central government. The impact of these people and organization is approaching critical mass. But people are also learning naturally from their own experiences in this long great depression of the 21st Century. Through un- and under-employment, people are indeed rediscovering the value of family, community, and neighbors. By increasingly dependence on government largesse, contempt for the stupidity and arrogance of the state is inculcated. Even financial dependence on government jobs, so many of which are despised by the very occupants for a thousand different reasons, breeds a kind of disgust for the state. As governments at all levels begin to cut services and pass on costs for past debt and spending to the taxpayers while bureaucrats continue to spend the money of other’s and promote their own interests, a force for freedom in the hearts of the people is nurtured. The central government in the United States franticly accuses Americans who prepare for reduced government, move outside of government influence, reduce their tax burden, and withdraw from state number-crunching systems to be "domestic terrorists." Yet, for all that, the central state will be the last to recognize the real changes taking place, and will be unprepared for the energized and widespread demand for liberty we will see in 2012.

2012 will be hard on the political establishment. Establishment Republicans and Democrats alike are discredited by their chosen ones who seem to blankly echo the failed European statists. Americans and voters of all ages are thrilling to Ron Paul’s message – a message that rings back to the great anti-federalists of the Founding of this country, and a message that rings true to our hearts, our faith, and the natural law so many of us have rediscovered in only the past fifteen or twenty years. The elections will be fun to watch, to enjoy, and to challenge in every way we can. The establishment candidates, whether Democrat or Republican statists, whether Romney or Obama, or even the ambiguous statist Donald Trump, have become aging pole dancers, naked political queens relying on equally aging fans for a ever shrinking payout. In no way do I mean to offend aging pole dancers with a loyal retinue. But politically speaking, this establishment is going bankrupt, desperately looking for buyers before the bank calls in the note.

2012 will be fun. Americans are seeking alternative economic, social and societal structures as we work through the government-caused investment, war, educational, health care, and security-state bubbles. We will increasingly, as a people, exercise our freedoms of speech, gun ownership, movement, and property ownership in part as resistance, and in part because we know the state really can do little to stop us. This attitude will be seen at all levels of society, and it will be exhibited by organizations, churches, businesses and even lower levels of government. Municipalities will reject state mandates, states will reject and even nullify federal mandates. Juries will increasingly be unable to be seated, and those seated will increasingly critique the state of government law, and nullify the stupidity. If the so-called "99 percent" can demonstrate without permission and designated free speech zone, certainly the Tea Party and anti-government groups can do the same. The nature of fun usually includes some healthy competition, some thinking in new ways, some personal challenges and skill development, and a bit of risk-taking. 2012 will be a year of fun.

I’ve been played it safe and spoken in generalities. To summarize my five predictions for the coming year, let me share a specific local story from a friend of a friend. A young man of 20, who happens to be a Ron Paul supporter, on his way home from his job in a local restaurant is stopped at a police "checkpoint" in our small town. Without cause, the cop asks a lot of question, to which the young man answers honestly. "No, I don’t have any drugs or alcohol. I work and am driving home." The cop, ignorantly believing that the convoluted law he "enforces" resembles the Constitution, states that [suddenly] he smells marijuana. The car and the young man are thoroughly searched, and temporarily detained. The cops eventually become bored, and the young man is released. The next morning, his mother, who lives in another town, calls the local police department and makes a vociferous complaint. The department spokesperson said, "Yes, ma’am, of course we found drugs on your son. Isn’t your boy the African-American kid?" 50 years of civil rights flushed, stupidity and arrogance on display, and white and black equally insulted by a state which seeks to divide generations and races. We are made one in persecution, united in a desire to own ourselves, our property, our time and our productivity, and to live unobstructed by a grasping and lying state that no longer serves or protects.

Leading edge 2012’ers will hold ‘rats and government lies and liars in full-blown contempt. They will learn and practice liberty for themselves, their families, and their communities in ways they tried in 2011, and also in ways they never dared. They will laugh at the charades, tirades and costumes of the writhing and twisting political establishment. They will take risks that will lead to real change, and they will find risk-taking not only liberating, but a fun and long-forgotten part of the American tradition. So, in these ways, I part company with the doomsayers, even as I believe every word they say, and don’t dispute their data. For liberty and community, I think 2012 will be a very good year.
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This originally appeared on Freedom's Phoenix's e-Zine.

LRC columnist Karen Kwiatkowski, Ph.D. [send her mail], a retired USAF lieutenant colonel, blogs occasionally at Liberty and Power and The Beacon. To receive automatic announcements of new articles, click here or join her Facebook page. She is currently running for Congress in Virginia's 6th district.

Copyright © 2012 Karen Kwiatkowski