[Uncle Billy]

All of this seems to have begun with the election of an administration, with a clear majority of votes, that's led by someone who is ethnically and politically much different than any leader in our past.

Not only are we frightened by his ethnicity (he doesn't look like us) and what we assume his politics are, the fact that he'd win an election with a clear majority from a war hero Conservative (who does look like us) adds to the fear. What's become of "our" United States (as defined by the power distribution, economic forces, political hierarchy, moral values, racial juxtapositions, and place in the world of the 1950's)?

Our country seems to be eroding and melting away from around us and under us; what was "the way of things" has moved away from us- or so it seems in our insecure and frightened conjectures of what's to happen to us when the majority of voters don't match our politics or prefer our ethnicity.

Well, it's a different country in so many ways than it was during Ike's tenure as president. In the manner it has always done in the past, it has changed with the times and with the will of the majority of the people who vote. Anyone who resists change, like the Torys of Revolutionary times, will be left behind as the dynamic, adapting, growing, flexible powerhouse this nation is makes its way amid a changing world, holding as constant as is possible the basic tenets of our identity as seeded in 1776 and 1789.

A lot of of the assumptions that have been made about what's to happen to our Constitutional rights (including gun rights) are not supported by a comprehensive, objective, close reading of the administration's stance on the issues as stated before and after the election. It's more emotion than thought, fear than knowledge that drives the perspective of too many of us. Now is a crucial time to get off our lazy intellectual butts, put aside our emotions and fears, and THINK. We must learn what there is to know from sources with no agenda or axe to grind and then decide independently what it is we stand with. Let no one tell us what to believe when we have the mental equipment and the guaranteed freedoms to find out for ourselves. All that's required of us is that we confirm the objectivity of anyone who tries to convince us of anything, and to have the energy, integrity and responsibility to learn what we can BEFORE we decide what we support or believe. These are the basic responsibilities of citizenship in the US which were expected of us by the Founders who gave us the Bill of Rights.

Individual freedom is more than a right, it's a responsibility, a duty of us all, which includes first of all putting in the intellectual efforts being free requires.