...many of what I consider to be the untouchable nooks and crannies of our lives.
I think you've missed my point.
What you seem to consider sacrosanct among your freedoms—the right to ride a vehicle sans seatbelt or helmet, the right to enter Coney Island Pier without showing ID, the right to drink competitively priced soda—are completely trivial compared to the right not to be enslaved, or the right to vote, or, in general, the right not to be excluded from the broad liberties inhering in citizenship in a democracy simply on the basis of race, religion, gender, etc.
You live in a state which just passed legislation in support of gay marriage. In Africa, homosexuality is illegal in several dozen countries and in Uganda was very nearly made punishable by life in prison or death, depending on the severity of the "infraction."
I doubt this distinction is what you had in mind when you lamented that
'what used to be "problems" are now "causes,"' but my reading of American History strongly supports the premise that most of our important gains in human and civil rights have come about because smaller vanguards of activists took up causes and worked tirelessly to attract the support of growing numbers of fellow citizens.
In fact, if I were to be asked what, if anything, makes me proud to be an American, I'd have to say it's our long and noble tradition of advocacy for progressive change in the face of overwhelming institutional opposition. We fought a revolution on that basis, put together a national government on that basis, and (with the notable exception of the Civil War) have allowed our democracy to evolve on that basis for almost a quarter of a millenium.
And if your right to breathe means I can't smoke in a restaurant, well, I'm sorry, but I just don't think such a law is something civil libertarians have any business chafing under. Grow up! A democracy isn't 300 million individual free societies; it's one free society which needs to accommodate 300 million people. There are all kinds of contradictions between one person's interests and another person's interests.
The application of a little common sense takes care of many of the conflicts. For those which somehow escape rational solution, there's the ballot box. Seriously. If you can't change a democracy in the voting booth, or, more importantly, if you don't
believe you can change a democracy in the voting booth, then you [not you personally, artie] should either shut up or find another democracy.
