The Cure In Our Hands, by Paul Rosenberg

The Golden Rule may be the greatest self-help ever devised. From Paul Rosenberg at freemansperspective.com:

I don’t recommend watching television, but I fell into one useful experience while watching it, some years ago:

It was well after midnight and I found myself in front of a TV, killing time. There wasn’t much on, but after some scanning, I found a rustic infomercial from a local church. They were offering prayer for the sick, depressed, and overwhelmed. My thumb was poised to move to the next channel, but instead I stopped and watched. I decided to look at the people in the pews—to really look at them.

What I saw were people who knew they needed help. They were in pain, they had failed to become what they wanted to be, they had hurt others, they were lost in the midst of a confusing world, and they couldn’t see a way out.

These people were not stupid. They knew that dipping slips of paper with their names on them into holy oil was silly. But they overlooked it because they were desperate, and because maybe, just maybe, something might help.

And the truth is that people often do get help in those places; not from the leaders so much as the other attendees. Humans are clever creatures, and when they try to help each other, they often succeed.

My point, however, and my surprise lesson, was this: We can complain about the huckster, but he’s only in business because people have nowhere better to turn. They know they need something, but don’t know what it might be, or where to find it.

In Our Hands

As it happens, the cure to a great number of those problems has been sitting in our hands for years, and we haven’t properly appreciated it. I don’t think I’m being overly dramatic when I say that liberty people (myself included) have failed the people in those pews. We applied our ideas to the tar pit of politics, but overlooked people like these… people who needed help so badly that they’d chase hucksters.

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