GUEST COMMENTARY: PRISONERS OF THE BODY AND SPIRIT

Alexis de Tocqueville, that trenchant observer of the American scene, and whose work Democracy in America is still the best book ever written about the American political character and experience, stated in 1839 that after freedom is won, all the rest of history is a constant and continuing battle for equality.

And so his prophecy has come to pass with a vengeance and accelerated with a quickening and troubling pace, especially during the last 30 years of our history. He rightly foresaw that equality would be advanced and bought at the expense of freedom itself, thus leading to the painful question whether a democracy can remain a democracy after equality has been completely achieved.

There seems to be a deep contradiction at work here and one that is not apparent at first glance. One would naturally think that freedom and equality are nearly synonymous and expand and flourish at the same time and step, that they are, in fact, inseparably joined in the aim and fulfillment of our common destiny.

That they might be opposed to each other is a reality that few observers might ever admit to themselves, even in today's unraveling nightmare of the American dream and even with the evidence and symptoms in plain sight all around us in the torn American social fabric.

Consider the litany of problems facing our country at the present time, one which everyone is painfully aware of and which seems to be insoluble. Mindless crime, overdosed drugging, the low state of education, poverty feeding on itself, a mounting national debt, etc. All have slowly begun to erode our national faith and point to a serious crisis of political debilitation. The feeling is: everyone knows the problems and no one can do anything about them.

We argue endlessly about rights and equality, while slowly these same guaranteed rights are being simultaneously taken away in the name of those rights. From mandatory seat belts to gun control, from expanding budgets to a bankruptcy of results, from the abridgement of free speech to phantasms of political correctness, from racial color-blindness to the loud assertions of minority privileges, we are witnessing a failure of nerve and loss of direction, a country deeply at war within itself and which threatens to embroil and consume us in division that leads to further and further inequality.

That the accelerated momentum toward perfect equality leads to a continuing loss of individual freedom is the paradox of democracy and a latent sign of decline and the loss of balance. No institution in our country today enjoys the approval and support it had a mere 40 years ago. No profession goes unchallenged, nothing is considered beyond reproach; everything is enmeshed in litigation and argument, a carrion feast for lawyers and demagogues.

De Tocqueville also warned us that the greatest danger facing a democracy would come from bureaucracy and, alas, that prophecy, like so many of his others, has finally come to pass. The rabid idealogues in education and government, shielded behind their desks and wielding the power of paper alone, are threatening the very freedoms this country has bled for too many times in our brief history.

Enforced equality first kills the spirit, devalues the individual and then goes on to destroy freedom itself. We are a practical people, proud of our common sense and belief that anything can be solved, given enough time and good will, and we are not given by our natural inclinations to see contradictions in human affairs.

We want everything plain and easy, in open sight -- problems that can be muscled into solutions and results, without agonizing over whether the ideals we cherish might demand a hidden cost that threatens the very ideals and assumptions we value.

The programmatic joining of enforced equality with bureaucracy has brought about divisions in this country which have sapped individual resolve and initiative, loosened the anchor of tradition and turned human beings against each other in a tragic drama of self-destruction.

The dreamers of Utopia always end up building more prisons, prisons of the body and spirit, and the more obvious their failures become, the more rabid and aggressive the methods they employ to bring about universal slavery.