Is it really so difficult?

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I've been looking at the LowCostVoyaging group on Yahoo. I can’t say that I’d recommend it: like so many USAnian based sites, it’s been pretty much taken over by the paranoid and reactionary. I can’t imagine most of them happily voyaging outside USA and its satellites. They’d have to deal with people who don’t necessarily agree with them, who are competent where they are not; who don’t measure wealth in dollar terms. I feel sorry for most of them – they just do not have the empathy and imagination to look beyond what they've been told to believe.

There are two or three posters who are obviously off cruising, or have been, and several who have spent a lot of times in boats, but you just know only in USA. But what I find really rather sad, is how terribly difficult it seems to be for the would-be voyagers on the site, to cast off and go. They agonise over details: which cell phone server to use; how can they feed themselves beyond the supermarket; the ultimately best, safest and most rewarding (financially, of course) investment; health care insurance; etc, etc. All the while they ponder, worry and debate, their life is trickling away and Bureaucracy is insidiously making life more and more difficult for cruising sailors. They rail against socialism, but don’t have what it takes to go and spend time in a socialist country. They write tirades about Big Government, but don’t realise they have fallen for the Great Con: that you are a better and happier person, working 2000 hours a year, taking 2 weeks off for holidays and enjoying your Saturday night potluck in the church hall.

Private Enterprise is all and Capitalism second only to God; and yet this wonderful system has them so hog-tied that they can’t even cast off for a few months of freedom – let alone for the rest of their lives.

Live free or die? Sorry guys, you don’t know what freedom is.