Freedom is Messy

Whenever people get motivated to clean up unsightly mess it tends to involve the destruction of freedom.

The result is important things, like traffic rules, and other things, like home owner's associations... as though people ought to have a right to keep another person from changing car oil in their driveway or washing their car on their own lawn or growing vegetables instead of grass.

And if your neighbor paints her house purple and plants cabbages instead of petunias... that's the price you pay for freedom.

As are roadside vendors, unsightly signs and displays, gaudy decorated crosses to mark car accidents and people with bad taste in fashion.

And protestors. And laws that make the job of law enforcement difficult. And trains that don't run on time.

Freedom is messy.

Now ask yourself what Freedom will look like in Iraq. Will it be messy? Or will it be orderly and peaceful? Will everyone agree? Or can we expect people to have heated disagreements about how the country should be run? Should we expect a rather chaoic mess or an immediate transformation? What should we expect to see and what would failure look like? A mess?

Freedom is messy.

So why do we not expect the mess?