[BearwWthoutBorders] Tobacco and Guns / Individual Liberty and Personal Privacy

[Hunter Gray]

(Stimulated by an RBB discussion)

Note by Hunter Bear:

Although smoking tobacco isn't directly protected by the Constitution-- as gun rights are -- there have always been plenty of smokers in this country.  But in a matter of a few decades, and especially this last generation, smokers and tobacco have been pervasively demonized in this country, the price of tobacco is -- via high taxes -- astronomical.  Smokers have been forced from restaurants, bars, even public open door spaces in many cases, and efforts are underway to prohibit smoking anywhere, including cars and even homes.  (None of this has eliminated tobacco smoking by any means but it's made it very tough to do so. I've always seen the zeal of the anti-smoking forces and their backers to be, in part at least, a so far largely successful effort to divert attention away from the corrosive effects of industrial air pollution.)

Smokers have never had a smokers' rights organization to fight for their rights.  Assaulted again and again, directly and incrementally, many simply crumbled and, in any case, they've lost most of their ground.

Precisely the same thing would have happened to guns, gun owners, and firearms rights.  But we gun people are generally cut from tougher stuff than many of the smokers were and are -- and, most fundamentally, we're very well organized -- and well  aware of the dangers of incrementalism and relativism.  The NRA and other gun rights organizations have and will continue to fight on principle and substance all the way -- trench warfare.  (Ken's ostensible concession on guns and hunting impresses me not a whit -- the attack on guns would never stop at that point. )  If the NRA had been, say, simply an organization of Sunday afternoon shooters, gun rights would be virtually dead in the United States.

Going deeper into all of this, it's clear that individual liberty and the related dimension of personal privacy, are at great risk in this country at this point.  That also translates into an intolerance of "people who are a little bit different."  The gleaming self-righteous and sanctimonious light in the eyes of prohibitionists, whether many Christian fundamentalists or superficial "liberals", is remarkably similar.  In great danger of virtual disappearance is the willingness of Americans to fight for the civil libertarian rights of people with whom they may disagree.

Despite centuries of physical and attempted cultural genocide and countless other vicissitudes, Native people, Native tribal societies, and Native cultures have survived. No assimilation. And now they're often doing more than simply survive.  A key factor in all of this is the powerful and time honored dimension of "tribal responsibility".  That boils down to this:  the individual has a responsibility to the tribe and the tribe has a responsibility to the individual.  If these two should conflict, the well being of the tribe takes precedence -- but there are clearly defined areas of personal and family autonomy into which the tribe cannot intrude.

Hunter Bear

HUNTER GRAY [HUNTER BEAR/JOHN R SALTER JR] Mi'kmaq /St. Francis 
Abenaki/St. Regis Mohawk 
Member, National Writers Union AFL-CIO
www.hunterbear.org 
(much social justice material)

I have always lived and worked in the Borderlands.

See my extensive Movement Life Interview, done by Bruce
Hartford of Civil Rights Movement Veterans:
http://hunterbear.org/HUNTER%20BEAR%20INTERVIEW%20CRMV.htm
And see my reflection ON BEING A MILITANT AND RADICAL
ORGANIZER -- AND AN EFFECTIVE ONE:
http://crmvet.org/comm/hunter1.htm

The Stormy Adoption of an Indian Child [My Father]:
http://hunterbear.org/James%20and%20Salter%20and%20Dad.htm
(Expanded in Fall 2012. Photos. Material on our Native
background.)  And see Personal Background Narrative: 
http://hunterbear.org/narrative.htm  (Updated into 2012) 

For the new (11/2011) and expanded/updated
edition of my "Organizer's Book," JACKSON MISSISSIPPI -- 
with a new and substantial introduction by me.
 http://hunterbear.org/jackson.htm
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