By Mark David Blum, Esq.
(Dear Mr. Blum: My name is Ross ***. I live in Syracuse, NY, and am 16 years old. … I am writing to tell you how much I appreciate you and what you are doing. In a discussion with my father, your name came up, and he suggested that I read your website. To say I read your website is quite an understatement. I devoured it. … After reading through many of your articles and submerging myself into your archives, I felt like someone had substantiated all of the thoughts and opinions I've ever had).
Dear Young Master Ross
While your words express an understandable deep anguish and frustration with your perception of the world, it is not yet time for you to stand against your government. It is too early in your lifespan to commit yourself to any particular ideology. Use this prime time and focus your fire and zeal on gathering information and making yourself stronger. One day indeed you will stake out a position and though you may stand alone, you will then know you are well grounded and are right.
Tearing a page from my own dysfunctional childhood: I was 16 years old in 1975. From my then world view, the then President of the United States had just been hanged by the press and driven from office by socialists and communists. I worried for my country and we had just lost a war. While everybody else was having sex and doing drugs, at the time my mission in life was to defend the reputation of Richard Nixon. Swept away in the political whirlwinds of the moment, what I saw was a child’s eye view of an attack on my President and how we lost a war because of the press. Then I met girls who had their sights on other political issues and so I moved on.
You can gather all the textbook information your watered down school boards allow you to see. Mom and Dad and even the news can only carry you so far. “Time” however is what you still lack and unfortunately, most of life’s real experience and lessons come with the passage of time. As you age and gather life experience, you will be able to place your feelings and perceptions into context of both history and current events. Without that foundation, you could end up another Michelle Malkin, Michael Savage, or Jonah Goldberg … and retard your maturation by trapping yourself in the mindset of your youth. What you don’t yet realize is that the most popular students in your school … football, cheerleaders, coolest … will remain frozen in time throughout their lives and until their death, their glory and life’s greatest achievements will have happened when they were 16.
It is obvious your heart is bigger, your mind more open, and your potential to achieve greatness yet untapped. Yet this is not the stage in your life when you are ready to make the ultimate sacrifice. Remember, as Huey Newton pointed out, “the first thing a revolutionary needs to learn is that he is doomed.” This is your great opportunity to absorb what you see and let it cook and simmer inside you as you grow and test your theories against the constant bombardment of new information. With the expansion of the internet, no longer are you dependant on others to educate you fully. What you want and desire is all out there for you to grab. I recommend you be patient and wait.
I promise you that indeed your time will come. It may be tomorrow or in 50 years. But I guarantee you that there will come a moment in your life when you are hit in the face with that which lights you up. Your passion and fire will be ignited. That will be the time when everything you have worked for, learned, and experienced in life will all come together. It will be at that moment when either you will step up and fight for your cause, or you will become a Republican like your father and seek comfort and safety over liberty.
Today you feel as do I and many others. Tomorrow, you may feel different. In fact, there may even come a day when you regret writing me with the statements you did and adopting publicly the positions you have. Remember dear young Master Ross, I and my politics are in the minority. Daily I am engaged in duels with the majority over the issues about which you read in my writings. Trust me that I do not come out ahead because we are talking about principles and issues so great and fundamental that most folks barely understand them, let alone have capacity to debate and apply them. Recently in court, I was making a 14th Amendment equal protection argument and the judge was telling me how mistaken I was and in doing so, was parroting the very language used by the Supreme Court many times in adopting the position I had. “They” sometimes just don’t get it and there is nothing you can do to defend. Steven Colbert called it “truthiness” and he is indeed so right.
It was once said that ‘Greed is Good’. When it comes to my personal liberty, I am as greedy as it gets. For that liberty, I am willing to fight and even to die. Every small encroachment thereon, I attack relentlessly and constantly protest my opposition. One example is at the airport and the insanity of security checkpoints. You are not allowed to wear ‘hoodies’ through security and must take them off. Knowing this, I deliberately wear a hoody with no shirt underneath … and make an issue of standing there naked when I walk through the metal detectors. You have read of my recommendations to the students at Fayetteville Manlius and Nottingham High Schools in defense of liberty.
What you can do now is not take a position on the national stage, but take these lessons home with you and apply them to your daily life. Look at everybody around you as though they too had picked up muskets and stood against the Red Coats and assume they all cherish the same values as do you. Then, should one of them be stepping aside or leaning away from those principles, you can speak up and use your passion and skills to remind them of that for which they fought -- liberty. Trust me, your loco parentis school employees and faculty will be constantly on the lookout for more rights to steal and more unconstitutional education to share.
Focus now on your own world. Let your Dad and me worry about the President. We really do care and work hard to leave a legacy of which our children can be proud. We may not succeed, but every American’s goal is to leave a world better for his children than he found for himself.
Truly Master Ross, I am proud to have met you and to know that I may have positively impacted the life of a single person. My own life, now nearing its end, shows little but the damage and destruction a person can bring down upon themselves and those they love. The future is yours. Be patient and never ever surrender.
