In summary, the plot involves the chickens who live on a concentration camp-like farm run by Mr. and Mrs. Tweedy. It is the life goal of one of the chickens, named Ginger, to break out of the farm and escape to a game preserve where they can all live free, away from the pressure to keep up production quotas and away from the fear of being butchered if they don’t produce.
Not all of the chickens are convinced that life outside will be good. Some see the Tweedys as providers, even though their provision is often less than humane. Some have a hard time imagining life without a barracks over their head and a daily bucket of chicken feed. In contemplating life off the farm, one of the less imaginative chickens asks Ginger, “But who will take care of us?” Ginger replies, “No
“Tax payers in the hands of the government”
one will take care of us. We’ll take care of ourselves.”
The price of liberty is and has always been that no one will take care of us; we will take care of ourselves. Taking care of ourselves does not mean that no one cares. Quite the opposite! Families should care for all the members of the family. Churches should care for all the members of God’s family. Charitable organizations should extend care to various needy sectors of the population. But when the government “cares” for us, we are no better off than the chickens on Tweedy’s Farm. The main concern of our government caregivers will ultimately become if we are producers or consumers, and the provision will be barely enough to keep us alive– and then, only if we stay inside the fence.
The moral problem of our day is not so much that the Tweedy government is busy fencing us in with an ever higher fence, the problem is that so many of us are content to be “cared for” inside the fence. We are oblivious to the fact that once we submit ourselves to lives inside the fence, Mr. and Mrs. Tweedy get to decide who gets fed and who gets punished, and ultimately who lives and who dies. When Mrs. Tweedy got tired of collecting eggs, she started making chicken pies. And she started with the most troublesome of the chickens first. On the Tweedy farm, there was no justice without liberty. And there was only an illusion of security.
The “childish, irresponsible, willfully oblivious, fat and happy” Americans that I wrote about in a post last month have been all too willing to trade their liberty for an illusion of security in the form of loan guarantees, debt reduction schemes, government health care plans, and government hand-outs of chicken feed. By the time they realize justice is at stake, it may be too late. They will wake up to realize their piece of the pie is a hot slice of chicken pie– brimful of steamed chicken.
