What...Have Taught Me About Liberty

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What Kerouac, Kennedy, Lincoln, and Practicing Medicine Have Taught Me About Liberty
by Donald W. Miller, Jr., MD


Beacons on the path I took to becoming a libertarian, while practicing medicine, are Jack Kerouac and the Beat Generation, the Kennedy assassination, and America's Civil War. Studying these subjects helped me to understand and appreciate liberty better and heightened my distrust of government.

I was born in 1940 in Honolulu, Hawaii, 16 months before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. My father was a Nebraska-born Navy surgeon, who viewed the airborne invasion of Corregidor and the Battle of Iwo Jima in World War II from the bridge of a cruiser. My mother was born and raised in North Carolina. Her father was also a Navy surgeon.

I grew up in a post-war Hamiltonian world where Government, victorious in war, decided that it could promote economic and social justice by creating such laws as the Civil Rights Act (of 1964) and Affirmative Action. Educated K–12 in state-run public schools and then at "Ivy League" schools for college and medical school, teachers and the textbooks they chose taught we students that government is good. And big government that has an interventionist political philosophy with centralization of political and economic power is better than the limited, decentralized type of government that Thomas Jefferson and other founders espoused, where government's primary purpose is to protect the natural rights to life, liberty, and property.

The Beat Generation, the first one in American history to be subjected to peacetime military conscription, rejected post-war statism. Led by Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation launched a movement in the 1940s that has had a telling effect on our culture. Seeing the ovens of Auschwitz and what atomic bombs can do, this generation of young Americans sought escape and enlightenment through sex, drugs, modern jazz, and Eastern mysticism. Kerouac's novel On the Road was published in 1957, when I was 17-years-old. In his list of the 50 most important and influential books of American literature published since the end of World War II, Robert Wilson notes, in Modern Book Collecting, that On the Road probably has had a greater impact on its readers than any other work of fiction in the 20th century. It certainly had an impact on me.

During high school and college I played the saxophone in a jazz quintet essaying the genre "hard bop." I also studied philosophy, in particular the philosophy of religion. My sympathies lay with the Beats, in their championing freedom and individuality and for being a voice against conformity to the established order. Nevertheless, I still wanted to go to medical school and be a surgeon.

In my third year of medical school, I was having lunch in the large dining room at Harvard's Vanderbilt Hall on a Friday afternoon in November when a fellow student ran in and yelled that President Kennedy had been shot. Everyone alive on November 22, 1963 (and old enough to understand what had happened) remembers where they were and what they were doing when they heard this. And like everyone else I knew, I was stunned by his murder. It has spurred me over the years to study the Kennedy assassination, beginning with Josiah Thompson's Six Seconds in Dallas. With the government's continued defense of the lone-gunman theory it is clear beyond a reasonable doubt that the government is lying to the American public. (The mainstream media also continues to support and advance the lone-gunman theory, and it dismisses or ignores growing evidence that Kennedy was the victim of a conspiracy.)

read more here:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/miller/miller34.1.html