The collective.  It is indeed great fodder for elections.  Who would run as someone who does not express total support for the greater, common good?  It’s about us and not about just you.

The collective.  If you don’t believe then you are selfish and narrow-minded and do not deserve the good things this country, and this government can give you.  Even if you don’t really want anything anyhow.  In the collective everything is given and everything has to be accepted.  As is.

Ah, the mighty collective.  It worked so well in the Soviet Union.  It was just great in China.  And Cuba.  And Venezuela.  They smoothed it over and made is fashionable in Europe for we all know that the Europeans have such flair for just about everything and their version of the socialist collective, even though it’s not really in the end a collective, is far superior to any that had existed before.  It has to be; it’s European.  And it appears to be working really, really, um, well.  So well in fact that we seem to want to do something similar here ourselves.  Only better because we are America damnit!

And so it goes.  The collective lives, it breathes, it rises to rule.  Time and time and time again.

We had a group of folks a little over a couple hundred years ago that turned the tables and rather than the collective the focus was for the first time placed squarely on the individual.

The individual.  That means you and me.  But not together.  Apart, as individuals.  For the first time ever it wasn’t about the king, or the queen, or the tyrant, or who had the most money or the largest army or the most land or could get together the most people and rule by mob.  Not unless those people were collected to vote, in a democratic fashion (though through a decidedly different set of rules) for the leadership and legislators as members of a specifically and purposely limited type of government.  A representative republic.  Radical but workable.  And genius.  Pure genius.  And more than just bold, it was radical.

And it worked and then worked again.  It survived attack after attack and war after war, even internal ones.  It survived but will it still?

The collective has returned.  And the individual has seemingly run away, retreated, headed to the hills.  And the collective will devour if it is not stopped.  Just check your history.

It has happened, time and again.  Only once really was it stopped dead in its tracks and that was done by those sad old white men all those years ago who had the genius to see that only the individual could defeat the collective.  It could free us from the bindings of England and also the chains of slavery; from the outside control of other nations and from the inside control of merchants or legislators or soldiers; from a government that might grow so large as to be even more fearsome than the collective.  It uses but will then go beyond the collective and it seeks only to achieve complete control over all and over each.  And what is controlled can be used at will and it can also be discarded in an instant.  Just wait and see.  Or look back and see.

All that we have to fight this new foe is, again, the individual.  That is, that means, you and me.

You and me, brother; you and me, sister.  Us together but much more so us alone.  Stand and fight.  Rise up America.  Rise up and be counted- one blessed individual after another until the collective can be no more.