Our country is the sum total of all it's parts. That would include the military, the politicians, "I (and you and he and they over there by that tree)," et al. You don't get to pick and choose this part and that part because those are the parts that you approve of and like and leave everything that you don't approve of or like out.
We seem to be talking past each other. Even the likes of politicians understand the differences between a country and its government and its military: that's why they were trying to shoot soldiers and politicians in Iraq but not civilians.
The vision of individual liberty that our forefathers had is what I love. It is imperfectly codified in the Constitution, was somewhat less perfectly (but still with good faith and honest effort) implemented by George Washington and company, and then brutally gang-raped by our present government and its political ancestors back at least to Abraham Lincoln--as we and
our political ancestors stood by and watched, some of us even cheering them on.
(No, I'm not one of those Constitution-as-Holy-Scripture libertarians. As Lysander Spooner said, "Either [the Constitution] has allowed such a government as we now have, or it has been powerless to prevent it.")
If you're defining "country" differently than I am, then it will be useless for you to assume that I love it the way you have defined it simply because I have claimed to love it the way I defined it.
If you don't like the path that our country is going down what are you doing to correct that?
I've gone into this in more depth elsewhere on this site, so I won't go into the whole thing again, but I believe that in the current climate lovers of liberty should have two main priorities: First, to acquire militarily serviceable guns and ammunition off paper and protect them against the coming confiscations. Second, to teach succeeding generations about liberty wherever and whenever possible.
Voting? Well, yes, I still vote, but mostly I have lost faith in its effectiveness. (No matter whom you vote for, the government always wins.) Donating money to political action groups? Well, I still do that too, but again, the very largest effect one can possibly hope for is to delay the inevitable crisis, and time is decidedly on the government's side: delay will only make the crisis bigger. Preach? Persuade? Orate? Well, as you know, I do that too; but I also despair of the effectiveness of that. Compared to giants like L. Neil Smith, Vin Suprynowicz, Claire Wolfe, Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, and others, I'm less than an insect: and the combined horsepower of all those plus others has not succeeded in waking up enough Americans for the libertarian vote to break 5% in a Presidential election year. If you're going to turn people's hearts toward liberty, I think you probably have to do it when they're very young. Run for office? Yeah, right. What a tremendous waste of time, money, and intelligence--and there's always the slight danger that I might accidentally win, and put myself squarely in the crosshairs of people like me.
So I'm doing the two things I think are important. I'll keep doing them, and eventually I'll be arrested and thrown in prison or killed like everyone else who refuses to be a slave. It's the least I can do for the founders who did so much for me.
