Will the Free Staters please sit down?, by Seninel columnst Michael Schuman
Posted on May 31st, 2009 at 2:33pm by bile Tags: Barry Goldwater, bob dylan, christian exodus, court, drugs, Edward Burke, firearms, Free State Project, Free Staters, fundamentalists, government, gun control, guns, individualist culture, John Birch Society, Keene, Keene District Court, Keene Sentinel, libertarian, Libertarian Party, libertarians, marijuana, mass migration, Michael Schuman, moral degeneration, New Hampshire, New Hampshire Free Press, NH, police, politics, protest, regulation, Republican, Sam A. Miller, Sam Dodson, Saturday Night Live, smoking, taxpayers, War on Drugs 2 Comments »Iused to say that a libertarian is just a Republican who wants to smoke pot and watch porn. That was before I attended a Bob Dylan concert in Laconia some years ago. Shortly after the concert began, a young woman two rows in front of me stood up. She continued to stand throughout the concert. Never mind that everyone around her was seated.
I asked the man sitting in front of me to ask the woman to kindly sit because she was blocking people’s views. She continued to stand. I asked an usher to ask her to sit. He spoke to her and walked away, the offending woman still standing. I called the usher over and he told me the woman said she will stand if she wants to because it is her right; there was nothing the usher could do about it.
Apparently this phenomenon is fairly common, because around that time it was lampooned on “Saturday Night Live.” At that concert, she was one of perhaps 10 scattered audience members standing. When I regularly attended concerts in the 1960s and ’70s the audience would either collectively stand or sit. That’s when I realized my original assessment of libertarians was wrong, since even the staunchest Republican I know would have the courtesy to sit down.
Libertarians say they espouse the rights of the individual, which always seemed to me to be just a political way of saying me first, second and third and the hell with everyone else.
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