How Bad Does It Have to Get?



 “What country before ever existed a century and half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve it’s liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms.
The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure.”
— Thomas Jefferson, November 13, 1787 letter to William Stephens Smith
This is one of my favorite passages Jefferson ever penned, as it is for many liberty-oriented people. I have a ball cap with a tactical Velcro strap that lets me swap out patches. I alternate between an olive-green Gadsden flag patch and my Tree of Liberty patches. Yes, I have two.
But the same letter contains an even more radical warning:
“…Yet where does this anarchy exist? Where did it ever exist, except in the single instance of Massachusets? And can history produce an instance of a rebellion so honourably conducted? I say nothing of it’s motives. They were founded in ignorance, not wickedness. God forbid we should ever be 20. years without such a rebellion.
The people can not be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions it is a lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty…”
Jefferson is not primarily saying that people are too busy with ordinary life to pay attention. He is making a much broader claim: the entire public can never be perfectly and continuously informed. Some portion of the people will inevitably misunderstand events or act on incomplete or mistaken information.
His reasoning is:
The people will sometimes be misinformed. Serious misconceptions will produce serious discontent. Some resulting resistance may therefore be misguided. But a population that remains completely passive, even when it believes its government has committed serious wrongs, is suffering from political “lethargy.” That lethargy is more dangerous to liberty than an occasional, imperfect rebellion. In other words, Jefferson preferred a politically alert population that might sometimes resist for mistaken reasons over a docile population that would tolerate everything.
Jefferson’s observation that political lethargy is more dangerous to liberty, made in 1787, carries enormous weight as a commentary on the twentieth century and now the twenty-first.
Most people do not consciously surrender liberty. They are busy living. They work, raise families, attend church, pay bills, and try to leave their children a better life. My own great-grandparents were mostly immigrants. Their attention was understandably fixed on establishing themselves in a new country and building a material future for the generations that followed.
That is not blame. It is an explanation of how government power grows.
The expanding state rarely asks the public to approve its final form. It advances one office, one program, one database, one emergency measure, and one supposedly harmless intrusion at a time. Each step is small enough to ignore. Each is defended as necessary, temporary, or too insignificant to justify resistance.
Apathy and political lethargy are not the architects of the surveillance state, but they are what allow it to accumulate. They are the soil in which it grows. Power expands most easily when people are too occupied to notice each individual encroachment and too accustomed to the last one to resist the next.
By the time the larger structure becomes visible, much of it has already been normalized.
You can see that same apathy in many of the comments surrounding the issue at hand:
“I have nothing to hide.” “It doesn’t bother me.” “If you are not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about.” “Surveillance keeps us safe.” Each statement treats the camera immediately in front of us as an isolated and harmless object. None confronts the system those cameras are building.
That is how we go from three cameras to three thousand, and then to thirty thousand. Not through one dramatic decision, but through thousands of small concessions made by people who assume the next camera will be no more consequential than the last.
Eventually, there is nowhere left beyond the Eye of Sauron.
Years ago, I heard Michael Badnarik ask a question that has remained with me ever since:
“How bad do things have to get before you do something?”
When I recently shared that clip with a friend who had become convinced that resistance was futile, the question came back with new force. It became the direct catalyst for DeFlock Easton.
How many cameras must be installed before we object? How complete must the network become? How deeply must it be integrated into government before we decide that it has gone too far?
My answer is that it has already gone far enough.
If we do not stop this now, if we refuse to object and demand change while peaceful remedies remain open to us, then the consequences will not remain abstract forever.
I do not invoke Jefferson’s warning about the Tree of Liberty as a celebration of bloodshed. I invoke it as a warning about what can happen when governments ignore peaceful resistance until people cease to believe that lawful remedies matter. That is the danger we should be wise enough to avoid.
We are not London. We are not North Korea. We are the United States of America. We are the inheritors of 1776, but we are also neighbors. Our elected officials are not distant rulers. They live among us, represent us, and can still choose to listen.
Now is the time for civil dialogue, public pressure, petitions, council meetings, and lawful political action. Now is the time to remove these cameras before anger hardens, trust collapses, and people begin taking matters into their own hands.
Let us heed Jefferson’s warning while the remedy is still peaceful, lawful, and within our grasp.