I’ve been gone from here for
too long, well gone too long without posting anything of value I mean. I should
warn you that the bulk of this is going to be very inflammatory, very
objectionable, ridden with profanity and will be almost novel length in its scope.
That being said, if you’re still reading, thank you.
I have wasted so much time and energy griping about
so much useless drivel, so much inconsequential subject matter than I almost
want to kick my own ass. It has dawned on me recently just how needlessly
arrogant and pretentious we have become as a culture and society. We are the
pinnacle of human malfeasance and we don’t even know it. We sully everything we
touch, we destroy everything we create, we tarnish and ruin everything that we
see to be beautiful, and we do it all without ever pausing to consider that
maybe, just maybe, our own egos have gone a bit too far. It never dawns on us
that we could possibly be in error or may have made a mistake. We as
“Americans” (god I hate that term), have become a nation of people that believe
we are the paragon of intelligence, enlightenment and sophistication in the
world. It’s drilled into our children, bandied about on TV in the rhetoric and
spin you hear from the anchors on the news, and pontificated as fervently as
any bible borne sermon by every talking head in “power” that we, our country,
our government, our people are the pinnacle of human social engineering and
everything that the rest of the world aspires to be. Newsflash: We’re not.
I’m 26 years old, I’m well read, I take advice, and I
know well enough to keep my nose clean and pick my words carefully. What
follows is a direct assault, albeit a verbal one, directed at my peers for
their ineptitude and complacency with the status quo despite their penchant to
complain. You’re weak, naïve children. You have no idea who you are as
individuals, having never had to develop an identity of your own that wasn’t
dictated by authority or a chosen emulation of a media darling. You don’t
understand how your government works, you can’t comprehend the real merit of
issues you hear about, and for most of you, and your reading comprehension is
akin to that of a third grader. How the majority of you graduated high school
is testament to lenient grading and social engineering. In addition to your
intellectual deficiencies I also find it alarming with how self-important you
are. You are not a special and unique snowflake, you don’t matter, you’re
insignificant, you matter about as much as a mound of fly dung, yet you assail
the world at large with youtube videos, twitter updates, mass text messages,
and a seemingly endless amount of photos of something that matters only to you.
You have little to offer the social conversation or commentary and on the whole
you’re a detriment to the future of the planet. You prefer to watch the Jersey
Shore of comment on basketball trades as though somehow it really had some
vital impact on the world. Sorry to be the one to tell you, but it doesn’t.
It’s all meaningless, just like you. You are the living, breathing, procreating
product of years conditioning, until you become exactly what those in power
have always wanted, easily malleable cattle to be herded and marched where and
when they choose.
For most of you, I imagine that thought is painful,
which is why you busy yourself with thousands of channels of mind killing
television, yoga, fad diets, calorie counting, trendy martial arts, commentary
about how much you hate the latest pop star shat out by your corporate masters,
and the flow of meaningless thoughts that you espouse en masse. All of these
things hurt your fragile little mind so much less than actually having to use
the ten pounds of pulsing grey matter that has been wasted between your ears.
So to those of you, I say cling to your petty pursuits, they will comfort you
when your corporate masters have taken everything of value you had to take and
left you with nothing more than an empty, broken existence that is comprised of
little more than bumper sticker slogans and tabloid headlines about which trick
baby of Paris Hilton’s is up for a spot on American Idol this week. You have
willingly let yourselves become blind to the truth that every civil liberty and
privilege that you espouse as being evidence for your prescribed superiority,
is being systematically taken from you.
We exist at a point in human history where we have
the means to share information at a rate never before available to our
ancestors and yet we squander it with useless pursuits of popularity and idle
time wasting. We could use these tools for so much more than we do but instead
it’s a sea of uselessness and advertising. Games that keep your docile or take
your money for intangible achievements that do little more than earn you the
ire or envy of people just as vapid and brain numbed as you are. Well done, you
just beat a five year old with Down syndrome and blunt force head trauma at
chess, do you feel like a big man?
Our government has neutered the very basis of
everything that we were brought up to believe made us special, and we let them
do it. We traded away our rights one at a time for the promise of safety that
never materialized. Our internet is about to be censored because the corporate
machine has grown weary of not getting Bieber record sales to five billion in a
one week time frame so now they limit our access to the last bastion of open
speech and information.
Now all of that having been said, shared, stated, and
espoused, I’d like to take a minute to get very serious. We stand on the
precipice of something terrible. The unthinkable is about to happen in here in
the US, this place we call the land of the free and the home of the brave. Our
government, of their own accord and without input or insight from the people
they’re sworn to server, has taken it upon themselves to propose a radical new
law, an almost unfathomable violation of one of the most basic tenets of
“American Life”. We are no longer free citizens, we are to be censored in our
information, and imprisoned for our dissidence. Since WWII it has been touted
as bedrock of our political and ideological system that we are free to do as we
please, to live as we choose, to pursue and realize our destinies as we see
fit. Now that right, that promise, that dream is being taken from us and it’s
being done, not with force, but with legislation. This is the first step toward
martial law. The first stone laid as the foundation at what will eventually be
the end of our great country. Within the next few years the fear mongering of
far too many corrupt, stingy and easily manipulated politicians will usher in a
draconian state that will bear a striking resemblance to Hitler’s Germany or
Stalin’s USSR. Our freedoms, our liberties are being taken from us, and we’re
letting it happen. Every day that goes by, Congress enacts some new piece of
legislation that seeks to undermine or curtail our activities just a bit more
finely. The time to act is now, and sadly there is precious little time at all
to get anything done.
We stand on the threshold of collapse. Our economy is
bankrupt, our enemies supply us with all of our material goods, our allies are
weaker than we are as a result of decades of systematically weakening them to
position us as the dominant power in the world, and even the people of this
country lack the fortitude and intelligence to really change very much.
Politics has become a numbers game where whoever can spend the most money will
invariably become the new poster child of the regime. Congress makes all the
rules, the president does his best to curtail their activities while exercising
his own agenda, and the Supreme Court seems to be sitting on the sidelines,
entrenched with meaningless cases. Our system is broken, and sadly it’s not
broken in the sense that nothing works, it works quite nicely if Fascism is
what you choose to live in. If you idealize Mussolini’s Italy then this country
is going to become not just your cup of tea, but a veritable Valhalla. If we do
nothing to act, if there is no show of force by the people of this country, if
we cannot rise up and speak with one voice, united, strong, and unwavering and
declare that the most basic principle of this country is a government “Of the
people, for the people, and by the people” we will wake one day very soon,
within the next five years, and find our personal freedoms worth less than the
aging parchment they’re printed on, and our children will be indoctrinated into
a world and a belief system that furthers this horrible reality.
Movements like the Occupy and Anonymous, show that
there are dissidents, but sadly both of these groups can and will most likely
be branded terrorists under the new legislation passing through Congress. The
Bill of Rights will be rendered moot, and the guarantees it offers will be
stripped away from us completely until we have only the option of adhering to
the wishes of the government. George Orwell wrote 1984 in 1948, he
believed that Stalin’s USSR would prevail. George Lucas released THX-1138 in 1971, a grim look at a
future devoid of emotion, where people didn’t think, but remain contented and
mind numbed by propaganda, medication, and complacency. Christian Bale played a
Cleric in 2002’s Equilibrium, and the
film portrayed a future where you could be shot on sight for having or feeling
an emotion. And in the mid 1980’s Alan Moore produced a comic call V for Vendetta that dealt extensively
with Fascism versus Anarchy and the crippling of a regime that used the
truncheon as its primary means of communication with the populace. While these
examples might seem like flights of fancy or simply great works of literature
and fiction, the sad and startling truth that we need to recognize is that
we’re barreling headlong into making these universes, these fictional fear
states of martial law and violent oppression into not just a reality, but our
reality. We are choosing this people, we are sitting silently and letting our
government condemn us to a dark new era. An era where thought and expression
are censored, where free speech is a thing of the past, where fear is the currency
and the standard, where love and emotion on any genuine level are simply
whispers and storybook concepts. A world where questioning authority, asking
for more, working for something better, being an asset, trying to contribute or
voice dissent is punishable in one of the harshest ways fathomable, and there
is no second chance, no appeal or redemption. A world where we seek only to
remain out of the government’s all Seeing Eye and instead of living for
fulfillment we live just enough to remain alive. We are allowing this to happen
because in the past ten years we have been made into small, cowardly, weak
willed, woefully ignorant cattle. We march numbly and silently to the
slaughter, never daring to break loose from the confines of the tract we’re in.
If our forefathers, the men and women that fought and
died to establish this country, the brave souls that fought again to protect
it, the countless sons and daughters that battled tooth and nail to unify it,
the innumerable troops that suffered flying bullets and bombs while praying
ceaselessly within trenches, the righteous generation that took up arms to
knock down two tyrants and keep our homeland safe, if they could see what this
country has become, the harsh unrecognizable ugliness of our political system
and men and women that are part of it, if they could see with their own eyes,
the horror that their sacrifices made way for, I’ve no doubt that the founding
fathers would lay down arms and remain British. The soldiers of 1812 would
march gladly with white flags in hand. The Union armies would simply cease
firing and welcome the Confederates to their own mandates. The brave soldiers
of WWI would choose to remain idle instead of knock down an empire on the brink
of world domination. And if my grandfather could have foreseen that this
country that he fought so hard to protect would eventually morph into this
beast of reprehensible rhetoric and ideology, I can only assume that he and
others from his generation, would welcome Hitler with open arms and wide smiles.
Genghis Khan, Caesar, Nero, Napoleon Bonaparte, King
George III, Joseph Stalin, Benito Mussolini, Saddam Hussein and Adolf Hitler
were some of the most detested, despised, and vile men of their day. The
victimized, subjugated, enslaved, massacred, and perpetrated some of the most
insidious genocides of our history, but the one thing that separates all of
these men from our own talking head in D.C. is that these unnatural men were
single minded and honest about their intentions. They may have offered grand
propaganda again Jews, political dissidents, or foreign peoples, but they
didn’t hide the ugliness of their actions, they embraced them and used them as
a cornerstone for the furthering of their ideology. Our men and women in the
designer suits, collecting six figure checks from businesses that want just a
few more options and a bit more time to oppress and victimize the fine people
of this country, they believe that their word is law, they are accountable to
no one. In ancient Rome when an emperor failed to protect his people, he was
beheaded, murdered, or lynched. In every other society, whenever a leader
failed in his task, he was publicly killed to send a message that failure has
consequences. Now we simply cease electing these stuff shirts in favor of more
virile candidates that use charm and blatant lies to beguile and charm our
hearts and minds to pledge allegiance to them. They’re ineffective, they’re
useless, and they offer no more benefit to us, the people, than any foreign
dictator would.
The power is ours, the time is ours, the choice is
ours. We can fight, we can crusade and demand that stars and stripes that so
many of our ancestors, our fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles,
cousins, and even our children fought and died for mean something again. That
the promises made and written down some two hundred years ago are not just the
empty promises of a generation long since dead, but are in fact the most
paramount declarations of certainty and decency that can be made. It is up to
us to require more of our leaders to organize public dissension of the highest
order, to echo the call for a higher standard of behavior, conduct, and
representation from the people that have the privilege to hold office in this country. If you’re a senator, a
member of the House, on some civil or municipal board of directors, you have a
duty and a moral obligation if not a legal one, to bear in mind and always work
to represent the wants, needs and wishes of the people that chose to let you
occupy that office. Your failure in this duty is not just a loss of power, but
a wide reaching and far spanning loss of faith in the system, the office, and
the idea. Democracy didn’t fail, the people did. We let fear infect us like a
cancer and we still allow it to influence and affect every choice, every piece
of legislation, every single facet of our lives, and we do it without even
being peripherally aware that we are letting it happen.
The world is changing, rapidly and energetically and
we are standing still. We’re too mired in our Tweets, our Facebook posts, and
who is getting voted off of the latest trendy reality show. We defend the
practice of devoting our attention to these pursuits with token rationalization
and little real consideration to just how indoctrinated we really are. Even
those of us who claim, “Well I read”, consider the content of what time is
spent reading anything of value. It’s all fluff. Twilight drivel, Sarah Palin’s
thought (I know it’s bad grammar but let’s be honest if she has more than one
thought at a time her head will explode), or some niche book that somehow lends
credit or credence to the claim that we’re individuals and don’t buy into the
establishment. It’s all tripe and it amounts to nothing of any real measure of
importance. Uselessness of the highest order and we sit on the sidelines with
our petty reasoning, trying to construct a reality where the worst case scenario
isn’t at hand.
Our government has been the world’s police, from our
point of view, a beacon of freedom and democracy to the dark corners of the
world. But to the rest of the world, we’re meddlers, inserting ourselves into
affairs that have nothing to do with us. We’re not making the world safe for
democracy, we’re using force, subversion and espionage to exercise our agenda
and make the world safe for our own agenda to come to fruition. We’re no
different than Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, or Communist China. The difference
is, we have country music to back up our claims of superiority and entitlement.
The majority of country music focuses on this country being the last safe haven
of people who hate oppression and paint the rest of the world as bleak by
comparison. Alan Jackson, Keith Urban, Toby Keith, Garth Brooks, all of them
have authored some abhorrent song meant to illustrate how the air in this
country makes you healthy, food is plentiful and cheap, housing is readily
available and affordable, and how our government is setting an example for the
rest of the world. Sad truth is that we have innumerable homeless, many of the
recent additions have been relegated to their fates by a failed system of
corrupt real estate with no regulation, a military affairs board that gives
little acknowledgement to those that have paid the cost for the ideological
freedom so many of us are indoctrinated to believe we still have, and the
majority of our farmers and producers are paid not to grow crops in order to
keep prices at an acceptable level.
It’s madness and yet it happens every day. We can
stop it, if we care enough, but we have to fix the schism within us, we have to
unite over something more profound than television and films, we have to
recapture the essence of our idealism, the very basis of the ideological
rhetoric that our forebears marched triumphantly onto the shores of Normandy to
protect, the very basic principles that so many of our founding fathers spilled
blood to establish. We need to unite in a single voice, to realize that the
world is in a spiral and only if we band together and fight the current can we
reverse the flow and make something great. I only pray we figure out what is
going on, and a chorus of voices chant in perfect harmony that we deserve
better, we demand better, and we will fight to achieve better. The essence of
the American spirit is something that is not dead, but rather stifled. We are
the country that landed on the moon, won two world wars, threw off the chains
of oppression from our colonial era masters,
and served as trailblazers for the internet, computers, iPods,
refrigerators, color television, the telephone, the cell phone, and even the
blues that served as the basis for rock and roll. This country was great once,
we were a leader, we innovated, inspired, and cultivated greatness. We nurtured
and supported each other and life was made better by our collective vision of a
better tomorrow, now we’re scattered, divided, and at odds with the basic
principles that only two or three generations ago were staples of dinner table
discussions and championed in the halls of foreign lands as the bar by which
all other countries aspired to meet. We need to take the baton back, to find
our course and demand better than we have been given, require more of the
people that are in a position to lead us, and cease the petty pursuits of idly
passing time and get back to doing something worthwhile.
