Fear and Respect

    I own my own home and all the contents inside of it (we paid the bank off 2 years ago!).   Every room in it, every piece of furniture, every painting, every TV, every computer has been purchased with the money I earned.   I have the right to go into any room I choose at any time.  Yet when I come to my son or daughters rooms, I knock and ask "May I come in?".   Why?  Because I respect them as individuals and their right to privacy.   My children both fear and respect me as their father as I also feared and respected my father (although it embarrassed the heck out of me to see him mowing the lawn in his plaid shorts and shoes with black socks).   The two go hand in hand.  Fear and Respect.  They are two sides of the same coin. 

   Fear is an external motivator to do what your told to do.  For a child, it's seeing the fly-swatter or the "paddle" hanging on the wall that reminds you what might happen if you disobey and it's reserved for times of direct and outright disobedience.   Sometimes all my father had to do was give us "that look" and we knew what would come next and we straightened up and did what we were told to do.

    Respect on the other hand is an internal motivator.  I respected my father because I knew he respected me as a person as well.  Like asking for permission to enter the bedroom so also I respected his rights to put demands on me to be home at a decent hour when I lived under his roof.   Sadly, we
have probably all seen cases, whether in our own families or other families around us, where a father (or mother) has lost the respect of their children either because the parent is addicted to drugs or alcohol or their poor choices of mates that causes the children to lose respect for them and actually hate them rather than love them.   Far too often in these same families as we see the respect diminish we then see these parents resort to harsher and harsher punishments to inflict fear on members of the family to make make up for the lack of respect.  Finally with all respect lost, we see that no amount of external motivation will have an effect on them and the family disintegrates.

     So also those in our government today.  Some rely on their titles to give them respect when it is not the office that garners that respect but what you do while in that office.  And like the parent that loses the respect of their children, so also as the people feel that their individual rights are respected less and less by the government, the government will have to rely on fear to motivate its citizens to comply.

• When we see our government officials disregard the law and make exceptions for themselves and their workers... we lose respect.  
• When they commit crimes and are able to simply retire with full benefits... we lose respect.
• When they feel its in their right to limit our freedom of speech and political action (IRS scandal).... we lose respect
• When the outright lie to us (ObamaCare and Benghazi).... we lose respect.

    Some in government feel that they can make up for this loss in respect by increasing fear.  We saw the BLM (Bureau of Land Management) show up with helicopters, AR-15's, sniper-rifles, dogs, tazors, camouflage and flack-jackets.   Really?  BLM needs para-military equipment to do its job?   We also know that many other departments have also increased their levels of force as well.  The HSA, ATF, IRS and yes, even the EPA has acquired military style equipment and purchased billions of rounds of ammunition.  Local police forces as well have obtained similar equipment through the Patriot Act and efforts to counter so-called terrorism.  Like a bad parent who feels the grounding is not harsh enough anymore and needs to use a baseball bat to get their point across so also our government seems to have gone the same way as well.  

    We need to put people back in Washington who will help "restrain" our federal government and "respect" its citizens again rather then call them "domestic terrorists" like Sen. Harry Reid has done recently.  Such rhetoric does not garner respect but only inflames the citizens more which will only make politicians like Harry Reid resort to more violent means to get their way.  We need Washington to obey its laws (both the letter of the law and also the spirit of the law) so "We The People" can have confidence once again in them and their laws that they pass.   And finally we need to demand that organizations that like the BLM, IRS, HSA and the EPA be DE-militarized and rely on local law enforcement if needed.   These military-style tactics do not belong inside the borders of the United States of America.  They belong in war torn countries like Afghanistan, but not here.