September 20, 2013

Five years on...


My sister passed away five years ago today.  I wrote this maybe a month or two later after I could muster up the energy to do so.  It's crazy how life has changed so much in five years.  I originally posted this to Myspace.  Not a life-shattering example, but you get the drift. 

I'm really happy that I wrote this because it's a real time capsule for myself to look back at those dark days to see where my mind was at.  I remember knowing pretty early on that I had to stop asking questions or it would drive me mad.  Life happens in not the best ways sometimes, and we can only learn by growing with those moments.  You cannot suffer the unknown.  

I miss my sister's physical presence.  I miss her voice.  But it is more important to know that she is always here because we are blood and we had 30 years of life together and she is permanently recorded in my mind.  There is nothing more infinite than that.

I love you Suzanne.  





Every morning I wake up to the constant realization that will plague the rest of my life:  I’ve lost my sister Suzanne and I’m not getting her back.  The emptiness that accompanies this sentiment is hard to grasp, because simply put, there is nothing there.  You know you will never be able to hold her hand, and you’ll never be able to hug her and kiss her on the cheek.  It’s a rotten felling to have because you know that you shouldn’t even be writing this because you should have been an old man and your sister should have been an old lady and it would have been a natural passing.  It’d still be sad, but you’d be okay because you’d be gone in a couple years too, and it’d be a wholly natural thing.  You’ve lived your life, you’ve done your thing, and now you’ve passed away.  But that isn’t how it is.  I’m going to live the rest of my days missing my sister who fought hard and probably lived longer than she should have with stage four lung cancer.  She leaves a husband.  She leaves a daughter.  She leaves parents, a brother, and a sister.  She leaves loving family and friends, two dogs, and a cat.  She’s left a world of suffering that she did not deserve and a bad hand shuffled back into the deck.  It was before her time, but time due for what she was going through.

What does it mean to lose a sister?  It’s a question that is answerable and unanswerable all at once.  A feeling that is felt, but also not transmittable to those outside of yourself.  It’s more than a sense of loss and more like something was stolen from inside of me, something not physical, but something that has been there since the day I was born and should have been there on the day I die.  This thing wasn’t fully formed, still growing with every moment.  When I was a kid, it was prevalent in my every day.  I just didn’t know it.  In my teenage years and early twenties, this thing revolved around that same world I did, just in opposite directions, being around just as much as I was, which wasn’t a whole lot.  But after moving 3,000 miles away from Connecticut, with every passing year, with every day I grew older, this thing inside could truly be acknowledged, and maybe even understood a bit more.  This thing inside of all of us is the greater importance of family, the connections and relationship you have with those who have always been there.  When a part of this is taken away, squashed from our psyche, there is a matchless loneliness that sits in its place and pervades almost every moment of our every day.  Even in a room crowded with family or friends, there sits an empty space and the density of the air feels less.  Staying at her home for two weeks during this whole ordeal, every time I entered a new room I looked for her.  Strangely enough, being back in my apartment in Reno, a place she’s never been, I do the same.  Where is Suzanne?  Where is my sister?  All I find every place I go are the places she should be.

She should be…

But she is not, and I don’t know when my brain is going to fully accept that.  Right now I’m at battle with reality.  And guilt.  And the “whys” and “what ifs.”   And the last week of her life in the hospital.  What I said.  What I didn’t.  It’s all there, swirling round and round on the daily-go-round, even in my most distracted moments.  When I wake.  And when I sleep.  I have no doubt in the validity of the phrase “time heals,” and I don’t mind waiting because all of these feelings, no matter how mixed up, confused, and upsetting; they are my sister, and I have no doubt that with time they will turn into her greatest attribute: strength.   

In the past year, there were conversations we never had.  Conversations I wish we had.  They didn’t not happen out of dishonesty, but because my sister was protective, not just in a proud way, but because she did not want people worrying about her.  Trust me, we worried plenty, and we were scared shitless, but talking to my sister was talking to my sister and I don’t think she wanted it any other way.  The cancer was on our tongues, but so were other things.  We talked about what was going on, and jokes, and memories, and parents, and life.  I wish we could have had many other conversations.  I wish we could have many more.  No matter how much I could let out at her bedside at the hospital, there’s always more to say.  I have an infinite amount of words for my sister, and where once they were heard, I no longer know what they really are.  My belief system doesn’t know what to make of where she is and this is the first time I’ve really been confronted with this.  Confronting the known unknown.  In the back of my mind I’d been waiting for the phone call that would have me on the next flight to Connecticut.  The longer she lived, the further off I could  push that phone call away, and the further off I could push the notion of death.  Then you find yourself in the hospital sitting next to your sister, holding her hand, wanting so badly for her to be able to come home, if only for a short period of time.  I don’t know how I could sit there and think about time in such an ultimate form, with an end in sight, but I did, and all I wanted was for my sister to have a few more days with her whole family, eyes open, breathing, talking, and maybe a laugh or two if she could muster it (and believe me, I bet she could).  Then as the days moved forward and she did not, I only wanted some time with her off sedation, but I knew in my heart that it wouldn’t happen and I became fearful that my sister would pass into the night, alone.  

It’s hard for me to look back on these moments and put myself back into it.  How could I not sit there and wish my sister to only live more than forever.  In the midst of her suffering you have to be as rational as possible and only want what is best.  Upon arriving to the hospital on Saturday the 20th of September, it was time to let nature take its course.  Suzanne was tired.  She let us know it when her husband whispered into her ear and a tear came rolling down her face.  She knew what hour had arrived, and let us know it by fighting through yet another trial with her strength.  Her body was giving out, but she gave us a true and knowing response.  Throughout the week I wasn’t sure how much she could really understand us under sedation.  As much as we all could, we’d sit by her side and tell her stories, describe pictures from photo albums, read emails people sent to the hospital, tell her how we love her and we’d keep her safe, and she even got one last friendly Kratky family argument (politics of course), but I was never clear that she heard us.  She would open her wonderful green eyes once in a while, but it wasn’t until that tear that I really knew that she could take her surroundings in.  She truly blessed us with it, and I believe she fought hard for us all to be there.  When my sister passed away, she was surrounded by family, all of us holding on to her, all of us telling her we love her.

It’s this moment that I wanted most for her in the end that haunts me more than anything.  It’s all you could do sometimes.  Be there.  It’s all you can do sometimes.  Be powerless.

Standing in the cemetery the day before I left to go back to Reno, I felt uncertainty inside myself.  I stood before where she laid, but still, I looked out across the grass and through the trees searching for Suzanne.  I will always search for her; in the windows of every home, in the slow passing nights, across Nevada’s desert terrain, and every time I look to the sky.  I know that after time I’ll eventually find her, and I’ll have to look no further than myself.  No further than my sister Rachel, and my parents, John and Maryann.  I’ll have to search as far as my cousin and Suzanne’s best friend Melissa, her husband Chris, and of course, her daughter Cyndy with whom we all have a new role.  Not as surrogates in a capacity we could never fill, but to embody the true essence of family and support.  Then I’ll look up to the stars at night and know that my sister fills the empty space in between, holding them together with all her strength.  In time, that empty spot inside all who loved her will fill with realization and learning from her life and her death.  The world has already become a different place for me.  Never again will it hold the poetry of fresh eyes, because I am old now, and unwilling to venture backwards.

Suzanne, all I can do now is make you a promise:

When the loneliness settles in, and the empty chambers of my heart ache, I will think on our childhood.  I will remember your smile and hear your laugh.

When the sky grows dark, and the “whys” and “what ifs” settle in, I will remember our phone calls and the times spent staying in your home over the last few years.

When the tears swell in my eyes and my stomach grows uneasy, I will fondly think back, and thank you for all you have given me.  Things that have shaped me, that may forever go undiscovered, but they are there and they are me, and I thank you.

Sis, you will never be forgotten, only known more and more. If I could I’d write you into existence again, but I know you’re in a place greater than words.  I love you so very much.  We all love you so very much.  

September 5, 2013

No Philosophy, Part 5


As I write this, Americans are in the middle of a debate on whether or not the central government should drop bombs on a civilization that is thousands of miles away so that fractions of the terrorist group that it claims to have been fighting for the last twelve years can gain control of the aforementioned civilization’s government.  Got that?

When this is the debate in a supposed advanced culture, something has gone awry.  When this scenario played out just ten years ago in Iraq, and the outcome was the destruction of a people and we have learned nothing from that, something has gone amiss.  When murdering people is proposed as a path to peace, you know that the world you live in has been depleted of good philosophy.

This cry for war is not about protecting people, it is fully about strategy for attacking Iran and closing in on Russia and China.  It is about paychecks being passed from the weapons industry to the elitists in government.  It is about creating new mythology.  It is about upholding control and writing news laws in which to control with.  It is about getting minds off of the awful economy, and into a state of fear and nationalism.  It is about World War III, whether you want to think that or not.

The world is on an awful path and we have got to change before it is too late.  Each of us individually has got to stop this lack of imagination that feeds this monster into gaining control over everything.  This is your future and it is tied down by the weight of an unforgiving organization filled with sociopathic liars, murderers, and thieves.  This is your life, and you’ve got to take of the fucking chains.




NO PHILOSOPHY, PART 5

How I Learned to Hate Slavery

Slavery is a big, ugly word with the weight of history attached to it, and I promise you, I do not use it lightly.  When I say that we are stuck in a state of slavery, I’m talking mentally.  I don’t compare this to the physical and mental enslavement that was happening in America for too long and which continued long after the Civil war within the prison system.  I don’t compare it to the brutal and demoralizing modern slavery within the sex trade that exists right now the world over.  The enslavement of the human race is one of submission of the self to an unjustified authority.  The slavery we live is a hopeless seduction of myths and legends that are schooled into us from a young age.  You will believe that a powerful federal government must exist to protect us.  You will believe that rights come from that organization through documentation that was signed by a few men.  You will believe that society as we know it would fall apart without the social contract, a non-existent document that nobody has signed or seen yet somehow is said to mold our economy and social structure.  You will believe that it is a feasible set-up for a few hundred men and women to control millions, and in some cases billions.  You will believe that the ruling class and the elites are something that exists outside of government, and is not actually government itself.

The one area where our mental captivity is darker than the physical slavery is that most of us don’t know it is happening.  Slaves held in physical captivity against their will knew that they were slaves.  They knew that somebody owned them and that they were held through force and violence.  Our captivity is just part of life.  It is what it is.  We live in a world where prosperity is judged by the level of taxation a government levies.  Some think a little more is good for everyone, some think a little less is good for everyone, but not enough realize that zero taxation of income is ideal.  Wealth is judged by how much material stuff is in your living room, not by your ability to earn, save, and create a safety net for yourself and your family.  Safety is having strangers listen to your phone calls, read your emails, frisk your body, and police your streets.  Freedom is spread throughout the world by the bullet.  In an unfree society, leaders have been replaced by rulers, not people to emulate, but messiahs to worship.  We not only have the task of taking our lives back, but we also have to take our language back.

I don’t think I will ever talk a single person into understanding the philosophy of liberty.  I will never argue anybody into taking the path of the individual and leaving collectivism behind.  Maybe I can introduce an idea or two here and there, but liberty is just too personal a path.  You have to not only accept and understand ugly truths about the world, but you have to accept them about yourself and your past.  That’s the real hurdle.  Letting go of and changing ideas that have been secure in your own mind for so long is a sometimes drudging experience and will last a lifetime.  It’s a battle that has you at odds constantly with what you have been told since you were young.  There are of course small fights that are easy to win, which for myself was understanding the abusive public school structure, and then there are tougher fights.  The biggest battle for me was wrapping my head around how a free world will work without the coercive, monopolistic system of government shaping it.  Most times though, this is only due to a basic lack of imagination.  There are so many solutions to every problem, not just the one we are lad to believe in.  Imagine the world being able to open up to those options once the central government is dissolved.  Progress is not as difficult as we think, you just have to get the one thing that forces us into the past out of the way.

All I can promise is that once you mentally tear yourself out of the world of total government, you will not only see life in a new way, but you will feel much more optimistic.  Your life will no longer be filled with the slog of politics and scandals.  Most answers to the issues of the day will be easily understandable once force is taken out of the equation.  You can move on to philosophy, the market, and freedom within your own existence.  Once the monopoly no longer has a hold over you, maybe then you can take those first steps into a future that wasn’t supposed to be.  That’s the first sign that the individual is winning.  Taking over your own life.


The individual can only free him or herself.  Your mind is yours.  You own it.  It belongs to you.  You must start using it.
Are all of these ideas utopian?  Sure, but even just the ideas that come with liberty, freedom, and peace are better than the reality of being a slave.

August 29, 2013

No Philosophy, Part 4


What happens in 2106?  What happens after we are tormented through the most expensive advertising campaign in history?  What happens when we have another Clinton or Bush sitting on the throne?  What happens when another generation puts all their hopes and needs into one man or woman, yet again, and the democratic system completely fails yet again?

Absolutely nothing happens.  We go on, split down the middle, having the same arguments while war and corporatism reign supreme over our lives.  We go on with our public schooled minds thinking something different is happening when in reality, it is the same damn thing.  The advertisers and sycophants will try to maintain the illusion, and mostly it will work.  People will believe that their representative, their president, their team is doing the best possible job, and when they force others to abide by their law, there is nothing wrong with that because they just want the best for everyone.

Life, for another four years, will not progress.  We will just wait for that next opportunity to herd into boxes and vote within the monopolistic system of the state.  And we will do this again and again, hopelessly in wait for the one true master who will finally change everything.  And we will do this forever while our neighbors die in debt or in war.  Instead of being the rock between the gears, we will continue to be the oil.




NO PHILOSOPHY, PART 4

STOP



“There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!” - Mario Savio


I love this quote.  I’ve heard this quote so many times in my life and every single time I do it retains deep meaning, but it is the meaning of a different time.  1964 was almost fifty years ago and life has greatly changed.  We can no longer throw ourselves on the gears and wheels because we are the machinery that runs the damn thing.  We are the automatons that march into booths and vote for the teams we’ve been programmed to root for.  Speaking from my own experience, most times we don’t put much weight behind our own team’s belief system, they are just part of the package, and they make sense as long as you stay within that world.  Finding our own truth suffers.

America has become a country of two ways that are really only one because they both expand the monster we call government with only insignificant details being different.  While that monster grows and grows we get more and more lost in the fray until our own individual autonomy is torn completely away.  Progress is not boxing yourself into a system without choices.  Progress is not government monopoly.  Progress is not democracy.  Democracy is just another system of collectivism and control that lets a small majority get away with taking liberty from a minority.  It is authoritarian.  It is the mob.  It should be done away with.

In 2008 I voted for Barack Obama, a man whom like all politicians, I knew little to nothing about.  We don’t know these people, but we get wrapped up in their policies, and their speeches, and their plans.  We like them because they present themselves as part of the do-something crowd and not the do-nothings.  They stand before cheering fans, who wave flags of worship in all their unquestioning, screaming, orgasmic glory.  And we want to be part of that, the promise of the bright future to be brought about by a great man.  Like me, I suspect that these people have no philosophy and their opinions and ideas have been marketed to them.  But underneath, I know there is something festering, something waiting to break.  Their individualism is just beneath the surface waiting to escape the forever hammering down bludgeon of the state.

I don’t know Obama.  I don’t know McCain.  I don’t know Clinton, Romney, Bush, or any of the others, and certainly these names will be meaningless to me in another decade or so unless one of their brethren decides to get elected as their right to the royal chair in the oval office no matter how worthless a human being they are.  Even though the awful policies of the aforementioned politicians will still effect the future, the statist stooges in the media will forever try to maintain the image of their captains, and only blame those who currently hold power (or the market) even if they have only been there for a few months.  Point in case, when Obamacare really takes hold, you can be assured the free market will take the blame once all the awful policies make our lives worse off, and then the new president will just have to do something.  Often times, the something they do is not what they promised and against their supposed political ideology, but it’s okay because they didn’t do nothing.  That is the gist of life in America.  That’s how we got Obamacare in the first place.

Somehow, even with all the baggage, these people on our TV screens become the answer, the way to a more fruitful American life, even though years after they leave office the government they supposedly changed is still indistinguishable from anything concerning Republican ideology or Democrat ideology.  It’s just government.  It’s a creature of habit, consumption, and ultimately destruction.  But we still believe them, those who wield a mighty pen that can change the rules of the world we live in.  Those who can create rights out of thin air.  These people that have the power to imagine up wars and then make them possible.  They have the might to keep us safe, if safe means keeping us in danger to assure that we need them to keep us safe.  They have the wisdom to do what is right and only what is best for us, if by “us” it is meant even just a minority of those that voted for them.

I have no problem admitting that I had a corrupted mind.  I believed that these men we elect president were more than just words.  I had no understanding of what this gangster organization we call government was.  I’d almost be thankful for the election of Barack Obama as it taught me a most important lesson, but I can’t be thankful because of all the suffering and death that are the result of electing yet another president.  These fools stand on their stage and give the world a circus while awful decisions are made behind closed doors, and all of us who choose to be on teams protect this imagery from breaking down and showing truth.  We never want that curtain to open behind our man on the stage because it will only show a body count.  We lie to ourselves.  We lie to our family and friends.  We lie because they lie and all their people lie, and the deceit becomes so thick that we can’t pull ourselves out, it just pulls us under so deep that the struggle to be free almost isn’t worth it.  It hurts.  The allegiance to our abusive idolatry cannot be broken.

When I finally realized that the crimes of the Bush administration were still happening, my protective instincts of the man I voted into power finally began to wane.  When I saw that all the agitation against corporatism and the wars was numbed by a people who thought that their votes had changed life in America, I finally began to understand that the president is only a mouthpiece for something deeper and uglier.  His words and image are only there to protect empire.  He exists for the audience to believe the opposite of reality is actually happening.  Truth is treason.  War is peace.  Tyranny is freedom.

Our beliefs are deep.  Even after disappointment, we go out every four years and do it again without ever realizing the scam.  I almost don’t understand how people can continue to do this all their life, but then I realize I did it again, one last time.  Throughout the four years of the Obama administration I started to read many libertarian and anarchist authors.  I began listening to podcasts.  I started reading the days news on their websites.  Eventually I saw that we really have been indoctrinated to live in a world that is not based in critical thinking.  I was waking up, slowly, and I can pinpoint my foray into this world being guided by Ron Paul, who for me was the final politician.

While I again began to put my faith into one individual, I felt it was different this time.  This person had a philosophy with the voting record in Congress to prove it.  He had ideas way outside of the mainstream and wasn’t afraid to say them, even in the face of total opposition.  He spoke a word that I never previously understood and only saw as a political tool.  When Ron Paul spoke of liberty, he meant it in it’s most true form.

Though I changed my Independent status as a voter and became a Republican for a 6 month time period in order to attend all of the Nevada Republican conventions to get Ron Paul the nomination, it was at this same time my ideas and understanding of life were becoming more and more firmly rooted in anarchy.  Quite the paradox.  Even as I was cheering during the last convention at the fact that we had elected almost all Ron Paul delegates to go to the Republican National Convention, I wasn’t even sure anymore if I’d be voting for a president.  Of course that decision was made pretty easy for me in the end when Paul didn’t receive the nomination.  Even though there was a ton of RNC corruption involved, he still never had the numbers.  I sometimes wonder whether I would have voted for a Ron Paul president if it were possible.  I hope not, if only because that decision would have brought me back into the statist game.  I am endlessly thankful though, because the path to liberty is the eventual path to anarchy, and this Texas politician was a huge influence.

All that doesn’t matter anymore though.  I’ve separated myself from that world of democracy.  I have no connection with any pre-packaged ideology, politician, or political system of control.  I don’t know what the answers are.  I take every issue one at a time, and sometimes my thinking on them goes in a direction that may be considered left, or may be considered right, but all-in-all I look for the most free answers that don’t bring aggression into the mix.

I have no interest in being one of the wheels or gears of the state.  In regards to the machine, I have stopped myself and chosen to opt out in any way possible.  It has to end somewhere.  It may be a slow process, but one at a time, we’ve got to stop paying attention to them and start living with autonomy.  The absolute best way forward, the absolute best way to shut it down, the absolute best way to dissolve the central government is to simply stop.

July 25, 2013

The good thing...

The good thing about having a blog that doesn't really get read is that you don't have to worry about not updating.  The No Philosophy series will continue in a few weeks with parts 4 & 5.  Until then....silence.

July 18, 2013

No Philosophy, Part 3


Did you get what you wanted?  If you did, is it okay that a not much smaller segment didn’t?  Is it okay that many smaller fragments didn’t get what they wanted either?  How about that a large segment opted out entirely, and that with or without with these minorities, there was a majority opposition to the group that got what they wanted.  Is that okay?  What exactly is it that you did get when the previous four years of it weren’t actually what you wanted?  From where I’m standing it doesn’t look all that different, but a lot of people have convinced themselves that it is.

Statism is an almost religious way of thinking.  It is built on faith, and anybody critical of it is dismissed outright.  Statism is the conviction of opposites where an entity can get away with saying one thing, doing another, and people believing that the thing which was said is true, even with all the evidence against it.  It’s a system of belief where two different groups involved in it’s mechanics can take something definite like crony capitalism and mold it to be either socialism or free-market economics.  For good or for bad.

Whether the thought pattern is war is peace, taxation is charity, or security is freedom, the most hardened belief of the statist is that they have control of the people that actually control them.





NO PHILOSOPHY, PART 3

MACHINERY OF THE STATE


During the first presidential election in which I had the chance to vote, I had the good sense not to vote for Bush or Gore, but then that just means I supported the campaign for a different person to rule over me, Ralph Nader.  My memory is vague as to why I voted for Nader, maybe during the little attention I paid I heard a blurb or two from him that I liked, but overall I know it had something to do with him not being in the debates and I thought that was wrong.  I believe that I had heard if he got enough votes, third parties would be allowed to debate.  Of course this was all at a time before I knew that Republicans and Democrats owned the debates and made all the rules.  This was also a time where I hardly understood what the differences between the two parties were (coming full-circle now, I actually see no difference).  I remember friends at the time trying to convince me that I was a Democrat and that if I voted for Nader, it was really a vote for Bush.  I’m sure you’ve heard that scam put out there many times in your life, that if you vote outside of one main party, it’s a vote for the other.  That is total propagandist framing of reality.  I’m sure a think tank came up with that one during the early nineties when Ross Perot scared the shit out of the establishment.  If you vote for someone in a third party, that is exactly who your vote is going to.  That’s all there is to it because when a Bush or a Romney or a Gore or Obama wins, the differences are in presentation only.  When an Obama sounds like a more peaceful and just man, it’s only because he’s a better liar than an outright violent monster like Dick Cheney.  They are one and the same, and more importantly, so is the government they are the figureheads over.  It doesn’t change, and of course there is no proof that much else would change if one of these third party characters got elected.

Back to the story of my first vote where my friends were trying to convince me I was a Democrat, the only thing I knew about Gore was that his wife pushed for music censorship in the eighties.  Why would any young person from my era involve themselves with that kind of racket?  So I voted for Ralph Nader during the first election in which the almighty federal government granted me the right to choose my new ruler.  Bush was then elected, and like most people, for a few months I forgot that the president existed.  If you aren’t a news junky, who wouldn’t forget?  When you replace a left-wing authoritarian government with a right-wing authoritarian government, you still have authoritarian government.

But then the World Trade Center fell, and like just about everyone who didn’t pay attention to the world and how America was involved in it, I was completely shocked, and then quite conveniently fell into a nationalistic stupor.  Yes, I had a flag on my car for a long time after.  This silly symbol of the state that I smartly ignored in high school during the Pledge of Allegiance(the name is even offensive) was with me at all times.  I didn’t understand why it happened or what “we” Americans had done wrong.  I didn’t know what Al-Qaeda was and being from Monroe, Connecticut, I hardly knew what a Muslim was.  I was too young and naive to understand that “we” had not done anything, and this attack was not against “us”.  It was all about the central government.  It was a criminal act of aggression against them.  It was blowback for things that they had done.  Individuals were paying the price with their lives for the violent acts of the collective.  I bought the Afghanistan police action that came afterward, but thankfully that’s where it ended for me.

So it was 9/11 when I started paying attention to the world around me.  A definite change was coming over my life.  The world wasn’t just my friends or my home.  It wasn’t just partying or working for a paycheck.  There was a lot of other stuff out there, I wasn’t always sure what, but this terrorist act happened right next door to me, slapped me hard in the face, and told me to wake the fuck up.  It wasn’t just on TV like the Gulf War or the L.A. Riots for example.  New York was a place I spent countless weekends with my friends.  It was where I took my first film class.  In many ways, it was a place that I became an adult.  I started taking the train there by myself at sixteen and it was an exhilarating feeling of independence.  New York City was where I wanted to live.  I’m not even sure I realized it at the time, but after 9/11, I organized my life a bit, moved out west the next year, and didn’t actually return to that city for years after.  Sometimes when I read now about the city New York has turned into, with their militaristic police and statist laws, I really do feel like the world lost more than just two buildings that day, the world lost a great city.

Through this act of violence, I started paying attention to the everything around me, enough that I sometimes wonder who I would be without that horrific event happening.  Change comes in strange ways.  I started watching State of the Union addresses, the news, listening to talk radio, and I used the internet for more than just online chat and reading about movies.  I started to realize that the government actually does something, nothing good, but something, and back then I felt doing something is always better than doing nothing.  After the federal government got involved in another police action, this time with Iraq, I knew that I now had to do something myself because this Bush character had to go.

So what did I do?  What was my big move?  In the next election I voted for the Democratic candidate, John Kerry.  Why?  Because his name wasn’t George Bush and he had more of a chance than one of those third party candidates.  Why, if he was elected, he would have ended those wars and thrown out the Patriot Act.  We wouldn’t be living under the surveillance state that we do now.  Police wouldn’t be militarized!  We would have a stable economy!  The world would be so different!

I’ll tell you what, right after I walked out of that voting booth, I felt sick to my stomach.  I knew I had just done something cheap.  Something I didn’t believe in.  I had no idea who John Kerry really was, but I voted for him and in the end, whether he won or not, it would mean nothing.  I promised myself that during the next election I would be a doubleplusgood citizen and pay extra close attention and pick the candidate I really believed in.

There’s a problem with that though, isn’t there?  All that doubleplusgood citizenry usually ends up meaning is receiving information from terrible sources.  You’ve most likely picked a side and are going to be watching MSNBC or Fox News, both meaningless gestures, just as much so if you watch CNN.  The media loves and protects the state.  All information they give you is bunk, backed by lies, and told with the split-tongues of lobbyists, think tanks, and garbage-mouthed wordsmiths who speak in fallacies and twist history and current events to the benefit of their team.  Of course the team is ultimately the same, a massive government whose tentacles wrap themselves around every aspect of life possible.

I’m not sure what got me, but the presentation of Barack Obama was a winning one.  I was still under the impression that we only needed a Democrat in the White House for a huge change.  He was young black man who played basketball to Bush’s old white guy who played golf.  His name was Muslim to Bush’s Christian.  He also spoke with clarity and seemed to have foresight compared to Bush’s marble-mouthed idiocy.  For a person who had forgotten what politician’s were and ached for some difference in the imperialist ventures of America throughout the world, it was good enough for me.  Of course, Barack Obama was bullshit from top to bottom. And as I would soon learn, though not soon enough, the presidency was as well.

July 11, 2013

No Philosophy, Part 2


In high school I used to get into trouble for not stopping in the hallway to say the Pledge of Allegiance.  For years before this, I only pretended to say it, either just moving my mouth or mumbling through the jumble of meaningless words that I had been told to repeat every day of schooling since I was in Kindergarten.  I wish I could tell you what I didn’t like about it when I was younger, but I can only say that I had an aversion to it.  As I got older, it was the “under God” part that really stuck out.  How could I be forced to say this if it didn’t mean anything to me?  At the time I was baffled by this because I thought religion was supposed to be kept out of school.  Of course as I got older and i moved on from not only religion, but the state, I saw the real problems with this trite piece of nationalism written by a socialist to help sell flags back in the late 1800’s.

A free people should not have to pledge allegiance to any symbol or centralized authority.  We aren’t even regarded in most schooling situations as a republic anymore, but a democracy.  If you don’t acknowledge a god you certainly can’t be under one.  This country was founded on division and should have stayed that way.  Finally, there’s nothing to really say about liberty or justice as they are just words, often spoken, but without any scratch of meaning in this country.  Not long ago I was at the Republican State Convention in Nevada (I’ll get to that scary piece of info in Part 4) and everyone in the room rose to say the Pledge.  It’s disturbing enough to see children reciting this because it’s not their fault.  They don’t know what they are saying and they are just following the rules for which they will be punished if they don’t comply.  But to see a room full of adults repeating this at an age when critical thinking should be strongest was disturbing to no end.  But this is how it is in a world where reality is a burden, and the comfort of words and symbols are all we need to reassure ourselves that we are right.




NO PHILOSOPHY, PART 2

Institutionalized and Crucified: Logic in Wonderland


I wish I could tell you that my first rejection of authority was during my years of compulsory public schooling, but it really wasn’t.  While it’s true that my friends and I avoided being a part of that system as much as possible, at the time we probably couldn’t tell you why, and we were there attending every day right through graduation.  When I look back, I realize just how unbalanced my life was in a supposedly balanced system.  I was mentally detached from the experience.  I knew I didn’t want to be there.  I did not enjoy the forced association with people I did not enjoy being around.  I did not enjoy taking classes with teachers that I knew were not good people(which of course led to just dropping out of sight in those classes).  Lastly, I didn’t enjoy taking classes that I simply did not enjoy.  All of this leads to a very unhappy person, mostly because you aren’t allowed to articulate these feelings within society as it exists right now.  No matter what one could say, if you expressed the sort of feelings I had about existence back then, I’d be wrong because it wasn’t what everyone else was doing.  There were no resources available for me to even understand what I was feeling.  The only option open was basic teenage rebellion.  Grow your hair long.  Dress different.  Skip class.  Smoke cigarettes.  Record music.  Hang out with your friends as much as possible and ignore the whole damn thing.  Be angry.  If there were grades for being a dropout without actually having to dropout, I would have had an A.

Writing about my schooling experience it’s easy to see why I was so misdirected throughout my younger years.  It’s easy to see why so many young people end up so miserable.  It’s easy to see why so many overdo it with drugs and alcohol.  A twelve year prison sentence is no way to begin your life, especially an incarceration that is not so obvious.

Imagine having your world completely open at the age of ten, having the ability to make decisions of where you want your life to go, what you want to learn, whether you want to make money or not.  But there is a monopoly on youth.  It’s schooling or it is wrong.  The freedom you feel from leaving this system at that late age of eighteen is indescribable, mostly because it is confusing.  Most of us go through our entire lives not knowing that we’ve been locked up.  Though not enough of us come out of the haze of compulsory schooling, when you do, it hurts.  You realize that in a world without the authoritarian state that forces you to attend their schools, you could have been achieving so much more, way earlier on.

It’s sad that in a country that heralds democracy, which is authoritarian no matter how you frame it, children are given absolutely no real choice.  They have absolutely no voice.  Decisions are made for them, even at ages when they should be making them on their own.  Children are pushed to be dependent, putting their individualism at stake.  They are placed in an unrealistic world where everyone is the same age and there is a group of authority figures, completely unearned, that have control over their actions.  School is totalitarianism.  It is indoctrination.  It doesn’t need to just be reformed, it needs to go away completely so that education can take over.

While I was unwittingly detaching my self from public schooling, there was another fabrication of authority that I was attending sort of voluntarily, the Catholic church.  I suppose this is more difficult to talk about because it is so personal to so many that I love, but then I have a hard time being less than honest.  While religion is partly voluntary, nobody really chooses to be involved, we are all taken along for the ride starting at a very young age, and as you get older and older, you really know nothing else.  Religion, like schooling, is indoctrination, and gods, much like presidents and senators, are the made-up authorities in unearned positions that you must listen to and never question.  Through all the hours of religious school, Sunday school, and mass, there is never a point where questioning this indoctrination is open to you, and often if you do, you are scorned.  There is nothing free about a system built on fear and with such a closed dialogue.

It’s a lonely thing to be a young person with your own ideas about the world and how it works, but to only be presented with one reality.  It’s the feeling of being trapped behind bars with the key only so far beyond the cage.  Nobody is there to give it to you.  You’ve got to figure out how to get it yourself.  There is most likely nobody to guide you.  And for me, without a tool like the internet, in most respects it took way too long.

I’m not quite sure if I can pinpoint my decision to stop going to church, but I know that it was some time around my confirmation, a ceremony I performed for my parents, but which I knew was the last major religious ceremony of youth and much like graduating high school, I could be free after it was over.  An anecdote that sticks out in my mind, and I usually consider stories that stick from youth to be transformative moments, is from a complaint my parents received about me by one of my CCD (Confraternity of Christian Doctrine) teachers.  Apparently one day in class I was acting out, being a nuisance, or what I would think of as cutting through the bullshit (urges I still get to this day, but can obviously control a lot better, maybe).  This particular teacher told my parents that I “crucified” him.  To this day that is one of the most exploitive things I have ever heard, and I believe my parents thought so as well.  How deep could this individual’s convictions be if he would compare the jokes of a child to the entity he worshipped being nailed to a cross.  He was using the story that informs his entire belief system to receive sympathy for his paltry situation.  Now you may consider this a small event, but it was huge and eye-opening moment for me to how religion is actually used, as a system of justification and a crutch for ones amorality.

In the previously mentioned crucifixion, religion was used as a sympathy card for an adult who had no idea how to talk to children, but yet was placed in a position of authority over them.  But this is minor when compared to how it is used within the world.  So lets get a scenario going and explore this through actions of the state.

George Bush, the much loved ruler for eight violent years over the American empire, is well-known for being a Christian, but he’s also well-known for holding responsibility over the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Muslims in Iraq, not to mention American soldiers and all sorts of foreign contractors.  Now we know that Jesus loves everyone, so I have to suppose this includes Iraqi Muslims even though they worship a different god.  So who goes to hell in this situation?  Bush, who has probably been forgiven for his sins by a priest, most likely gets a special ticket to heaven even with all the blood that is on his hands.  Now I’m only guessing, but because Muslims don’t worship the Christian God they would get sent to hell upon their innocent lives being taken from them by a ticket-to-heaven-having-monster like Bush.

Lets go over that one more time to be clear, George Bush goes to heaven after starting a war and murdering hundreds of thousands and asking for forgiveness, while the hundreds of thousands go to hell for being murdered by a Christian, but not being one.  No thanks.  If that is Christian morals and ethics, if that is religious logic, I’ll take my own road and free myself from this contradictory conditioning.  Forget separation of church and state, I’ve got to separate from the church and the state.

Sure, religion is voluntary, but most of us are indoctrinated before we can make the choice to live life within reality or underneath the weight of yet another authoritarian system.  It is always interesting to me to see so many people ready to opt out of the state, but not religion, and so many others ready to opt out of religion, but not the state.  They are one and the same, but we only seem to be able to exit one door.  You may free yourself and feel the sunshine for a day, but it won’t be long before the sun sets below the horizon and your world is covered in darkness.  There is always another door to exit, and then shut behind you forever.

July 4, 2013

No Philosophy, Part 1


At some point within the last decade, you’ve no doubt found yourself within a crowd of people shouting “USA! USA! USA!”  At times this chant would spark at random, at others it was directed towards an individual or group of individuals as a tool of opposition.  There’s a possibility that you may have been a part of the chanters, and maybe you aren’t even quite sure why.  Whatever it was about, the sea of angry faces shouting at the black wall always filled me with a dark anxiety.  The atmosphere would change and you knew that something awful could happen at any moment.  There was a feeling of hopelessness within that cry of American philosophy.  There was no escape, the people surrounded you, barfing out three meaningless letters with the type of abandon you never wish to see.

The first time this happened I knew it was something bad, but I couldn’t quite figure out why.  There was a force behind that rage and it was built from the rubble of 9/11, but as time went on and we could actually watch ourselves in real time go further and further from any kind of free country, the cry became a lampoon of itself.  It became a mockery that tried to compare the America that is to an America that probably never was.  It was an obnoxious refusal to see life as it actually is.  The ubiquitous we only went on, never forgetting, never trying to understand, and never learning.  There was no reflection.  There was no trying to get better.

It has been more than a decade now since that ugly day and the philosophy has not changed, it’s surpassed the joke and is coming back to its dark place in history simply because it will not go away.  The true believers have only grown more fervent with their screams of jubilee.  They look unto the world with stars in their eyes, never able to see beyond their violent messiah’s who block the way with the blank canvas called progress held high before them.

There is strength in mythology and that is the foundation of America.  There is no learning from the past if it’s a constant lie.  There is no action in the present from a public bewildered by fireworks.  There is no hope for the future without an understanding of liberty.  The following blogs are my personal story on how I found it.


NO PHILOSOPHY, PART 1:

Curiosity Killed the Kitten


It took a lot longer than it should have for me to understand who I am.  While there are still conclusions to be made, the general idea is there, and it’s loud and clear: I am an anarchist.  Why did it take until my thirties for me to get to here?  How could it have been such a long road to the natural ideals of freedom and liberty?  There seemed to be no clear path before me when I was younger, even if I was virtually on the cusp for the entirety of my teens and twenties.   The need for truth is just below the surface for all of us, but how do we reach that when we are disposed of into a system of schooling for countless hours during our most curious period.  That curiosity is schooled out of us all and what we have left at the end of the day is the appeal to authority.  That appeal leaves us only with the truth as they have told us.  Our minds are only what they have been molded to be.  Our uniqueness and individuality is not part of that process.

There is a serious, sometimes painful process involved in detaching your mind from the status quo.  It has been recognized as unschooling, sort of a rewiring in search of truth as it is, not as it is presented.  For all too long I was going the route of the statist, believing that the answers to the world’s problems came down to voting men and women into positions of management and lawmaking.  I thought that a select few elites, known as congressmen, presidents, and judges that were put into in a ruling class known as government were the intellectual stalwarts that could shape morals through legislation.  That is a very scary place to be.  The belief that a government is everybody, you and I, and not just those who work within it to bend it to their own wants is something I now see as a serious lack of philosophy.  To leave the fate of masses to the unsophisticated ideas of a few strangers, rather than the billions that make up the market is probably the biggest blunder in human history.  The end result of this thing called government is disturbing.  You don’t need to look any further than the violence of war and the millions of deaths that come with it.  This is fascism.  This is communism.  This is democracy.  This is government.

When I was eighteen and registered to vote I realized the stupidity of the Republican/Democratic paradigm and found more value in being an Independent voter.  But what does that really mean in a two-party system?  It was just a title with no weight.  In fact, independence itself holds no weight in America because it is an authoritarian collectivist system.  I have eschewed state-defined independence as much as aligning myself with either of the two ruling classes(that really make up one).  As I get older, my ideas feel as though they have become younger.  The spirit of the individual is an invigorating one to embrace.  Once you awaken from the created and managed world and find there is still something worth fighting for, you can almost feel the movement of the earth, because you know that somewhere inside each of us is that unique spirit waiting to erupt from the chains placed around our necks.  There is a movement for liberty that is happening now.  The younger this movement becomes, and the young are embracing it all the time, the greater chance we have at a future free from the cesspool of bad philosophy that is the state.

For somebody in their teens or even twenties to have access to new ideas and champion them is no huge leap, but for those in their thirties and older this is not the case.  We each have a past full of abuses that have gone unrecognized in which we have to face.  Where I began is not necessarily where you will begin.  Liberty is a personal journey, though individualism and freedom may be the ultimate goal, that means something different for everyone.  One thing is for sure, changing the nature and meaning of authority is the common theme.  Authority is not a person in a costume holding a gun to your head.  Authority is not a person who holds an unearned position in society, wears teams colors, and consistently does the opposite of what they say.  Authority is not a group of people who try to shape and manage society with a set of words written on a piece of paper.

Ultimately, you know what is best for you.  That is the goal.  Living life as an individual.  Being your own authority over your own property.  Owning yourself.

June 23, 2013

The terrible truth.

When you support the destruction of another's civilization, it only results in the destruction of your own.

You reap what you sow.  Stop supporting the federal government's tyranny overseas.

May 8, 2013

Swept Under the Rug

Endless taxation for an endless debt.
Conscription.
Slavery.
Native American genocide.
Foreign police actions.
Corporatist healthcare.
Millions of Muslims killed, injured, & made into refugees within the last twenty years.
Prohibition.
The drug war.
TSA.
CIA.
FBI.
Gitmo.
Protectionism.
Price Controls.
The head gang having the monopoly on "education" and schooling your children to love them.
STD experiments in third world countries.
Support of dictators.
Supporting Islamic extremists - fighting Islamic extremists - supporting Islamic extremists - etc.
Seizing power in Iran and handing it over to a maniac.
Prosecution of whistleblowers who protect what they swore to protect.
Wiretapping.
Assassination.
Drone strikes.
Police State at home.
New York police stopping and frisking whomever they want.
Inflation.
Making gold illegal.
Japanese concentration camps.
Torture.
Stealing Hawaii.
Endless laws.
WMD.
The Iraq war.
The perpetuation of myths.
Preemptive strikes.
Licensing.
Segregation.
Regulation.
Endless bases around the world.
Provocation of war with North Korea & Iran amongst other places.
The shutting down of Boston to find one 19 year old kid.
Gun laws.
Gay marriage.
Two party ruling class that makes laws to keep it between two parties.
The bailouts.


And on and on and on.

Tyranny isn't around the corner, it's in your fucking face.

April 30, 2013

The Black Wall - Project Synopsis


I'm seeking out an artist for a new webcomic I'm finishing the script up on.  If you're interested, please contact me.

THE BLACK WALL

STORY: Twenty years have passed since the World Trade Center was attacked on 9/11 and America has become a much changed place.  Hank Mitchum has spent his years outside of the military wandering from state to state, job to job, until his mother’s death brings him back to Reno, NV where he grew up.  It is here that his eyes open to the reality of a changing society far removed from the pre-terror world where the presence of the state was felt much less.

Hank becomes intertwined with this safeguarded world when his old military friend Mark Stern offers him a job within the security-industrial complex.  The chance at easy money from an easy job has Hank saying yes no matter what his qualms are.  At the same time Hank meets a young prostitute that he saves from the brutality of a Federal Security Guard, but quickly loses to the alienated, violent world that has come into being in the waning years of empire.

Though Hank has suspicions of the business his friend Mark is in being of questionable nature, he must decide between exposing conspiracy and showing Sara the way to personal freedom.

The anxiety of Hank’s struggle is set against an America growing more chaotic by the day: A group of Senators make an attempt to unravel the police state.  Labor unions start a nationwide garbage strike when demands aren’t met.  Inflation is hitting food and gas prices.  Washington is digging it’s claws deep into Africa, provoking a new ground war as part of the war on terror.

The Black Wall is a story about the fatal decisions made in a world left to the philosopher kings and soldiers of fortune.  


PHILOSOPHY: This is not a story that lies within the confines of mainstream ideology, and it is certainly no friend to the authoritarian state as it exists right now.  I don’t believe this story has a right or left direction as it focuses in on the corporatist state, the police state, and the surveillance state, and how personal freedom and civil rights work within a world that accepts these dangerous conditions as normal.  While my personal ideology falls somewhere within the anarcho-libertarian world view, I can’t see a liberal who understands the importance of civil liberties having problems with the presentation of the story.  I only mention philosophy because I don’t believe a partnership on this project could survive without being up front about it.  Any artist that signs on will probably have to be on board with the ideas presented or at least open to new ideas.

ARTIST:  I’m looking for somebody who is as serious about their art as I am about writing.  I’m not looking for a beginner or a pro, but somebody who is where I am, ready to make things happen with a strong project.  I’ll be up front, I can’t pay a lot per page, but I definitely don’t expect anybody to do this for free.       I’ve personally had it very good for a long time with my other projects, but that dynamic isn’t the norm.  I don’t take skill or time lightly.  As a writer I understand the thousands of hours you have put into your work and I will put forth the best price I can.
Any earnings will be a 50/50 split after what has been paid up front has been earned.

ART STYLE:  I may envision the finished look of this comic one way, but you may read the script and see something else entirely.  This is actually the most exciting part for me personally.  Here’s how I see the comic: Black and White, heavily influenced by noir style comics, with the gritty look of films of the 1970’s.  After reading the script, you may try to convince me that this should be sparsely colored or full-colored and that we need a colorist.  It  may be the case that my idea of how this should look is very unoriginal and you have something much stronger to offer.  I want to hear it!  I can’t wait to hear it.

Now the look of the world is very important and I don’t think there is much compromise here.  It is the near future, but America has never gotten out of its economic depression.  It’s a future of two worlds.  One where we are getting used to the facts of stagnating prosperity, but also where we still spend and vacation and try to live the dream of the consumer.  It’s a world of Disneyland and depravity, the past and the future, smartphones, drones, pimps, and pushers.  While most of the story takes place in poorer areas, we will see the slick future that we are always presented with in movies, but in far out of reach places for the average person.

MY WRITING STYLE:  The style I’ve developed over the years is pretty straight-forward.  I don’t think there is an industry standard for comic writing, and if there is, I’m not sure where I fall.  I used to write comics in a very episodic fashion, but I have completely dropped that with The Black Wall.  This story is structured through acts and scenes of varying lengths.  I don’t write them in print comic length.  I don’t believe a story appearing on the internet should be that confined or structured.  I am very detail-oriented and describe the character’s mindset and atmosphere of the locations at the head of each scene.  The pages of the scene are broken down panel by panel with description of the action and feeling that should be presented within the panel.  I also like to use a lot of symbolism within the visuals.

I don’t want to come across as a control freak.  I’m very much into the artistic partnership aspect of comic books.  I also understand that you are trying to interpret written words into a visual medium in a very limited space.  Things will obviously change from script to fully drawn page.  I try to conform one scripted page as much as possible to working on one piece of paper.  I may get overzealous sometimes and you’ll need to control that.

PERSONAL EXPERIENCE:  I don’t have professional experience, but I have been seriously working on my own writing for the last ten years.  It is how most of my free time is spent, and I personally love spending it that way.  It is sometimes obsessively spent that way and I have to force myself to step back from it.  I have written screenplays, short stories, comics, and blogs.  Right now I have three comics online.  Two old, Coffee Time & Across the Way, and one current, Tales of Hammerfist.

I consider the two older comics a huge education for me.  It’s where I really learned to do this and since I placed the dialogue bubbles onto the page  myself it is where I really learned that overwriting can ruin a page.  I also learned a great deal about pacing.  I used to feel that an online comic had to be more episodic, but crafted correctly I now know that they can work like any other story.  Momentum in the online comic world is important.

The most important lesson I learned is to have a finished script.  Both comics had a general direction but were largely improvised.  My current project, Hammerfist, is completely mapped out and the script is about half-written.  The Black Wall is 95% finished, with the remaining 5% being tweaks to details as of the writing of this synopsis.  I’ve learned the importance of the artist knowing the extent of the commitment, and this project will be a multi-year one.  As of right now, the comic is 264 pages long.  During the month of May I will working over the final draft, so I imagine that is a good estimate of how long it will be.

OTHER DETAILS:  If you have made it this far, you might have a real interest.  So lets get into some other details of The Black Wall.  I would like to see two pages appearing online per week, but understand if you can only do one, or prefer to start at one to get used to the schedule.  I think two would be ideal though.

With the completion of each Act I would like to see a release in print form (unless of course they are shorter acts), with a full book being released once the whole thing is online.  The plan is to also have an e-book, and I would like to figure something out for mobile devices where you can flip through one panel at a time.  This isn’t a hobby.  Profits are important.

I only expect art for the comic, but any help creating art for the books, website, internet advertising, flyers and such would be helpful.  I’m pretty decent with Photoshop, so it isn’t expected.

This comic will fall under the Coffee Time Comics banner.

If anything feels off-base within this synopsis, please let me know.  I don’t mind criticism and find feedback helpful.  Thank you for taking interest in this project.

You can contact me by using scrim or though this blog.

Thank you.

John kratky

P.S.  You can view my current comic Tales of Hammerfist.





April 22, 2013

Why hasn't government centralized time to create more hours in the day?

Crap!  I'm not happy that I haven't posted lately.  I've been slowly working on a new piece that will end up being posted in three sections.  Hopefully i will have some of that online soon.  All my focus has been on a new comic I'm working on.  I almost have it to where I want it, so maybe in the next few months I'll be back to writing a new essay at least twice a month, but even then I'll be finishing the script for my current comic and I hold that work above everything.

Anyway, I'm not sure who out there is reading this, but I wanted to place an update here.  I love exploring my thoughts on the world through this blog because it only makes my philosophy that much more solid.

If you're interested in comics at all, you can check out my current work called Tales of Hammerfist.

Thanks.

-John

March 28, 2013

Subtract

I felt the need to create an image that would be in solidarity with those that supports consenting adults creating contracts between each other without it being about "equality". I don't really believe that you can begin to think about an abstraction like equality until you subtract the state from the picture. I stand with everyone who is taking this on, I just think you're doing it wrong.

February 27, 2013

"We" the People


From the latest president, all the way back to the Constitution, the ubiquitous “we” is felt within the language of government, but what is the meaning of this word?  It is all encompassing in both uses, meaning all that reside within the plot of land known as the United States of America, but it is more far reaching in its modern use.  Where the founding collective of the USA was, ideally, more concerned with “we” as individuals and with “we” being born with certain rights (unless of course you were black, a woman, or a child), the current “we” is a one-size-fits-all democracy where a program that may be good for my neighbor had better be good for me, because I really don’t have a choice.  And that is the problem with the modern conception of ‘we”, where in reality I have choices and you have a choices born out of our own free will to decide for ourselves, lumped together as “we”, choice becomes rather dwindling. 

            It’s not “us” who lumps one another into the backwards simplicity of programs that treat the individuals of this land mass as though “we” were basically the same people living basically the same lives, it’s “them.”  And there is a definite collective of  “them” who rate “us” as second-class citizens that can have our individual lives molded into one.  When a person goes to the grocery store, they know whether they want an apple or an orange, but the choice in today’s market extends far beyond that and one can choose a kiwi, a pineapple, a banana, a grapefruit, and so on.  If our food can be marketed toward the individual, then why would this choice not exist with everything?  Why are the complicated systems and differences of “we” the individuals instead lumped together as a single, simple unit with no defining character?

            “We” as one mass of people don’t seem like a force for good.  This collective of America has failed in that it only seeks power and control over masses of people.  There could be no other way for government.  The empowered individual would have no use for the crimes of the collective in his or her life.  Can a collective that claims to support freedom take over other collectives and occupy their land?  The collective “we” uses words such as justice, yet hand out money to the richest and support those that don’t wish to support themselves.  The collective of America steals the labor of working adults, throws their neighbors into cages, and assures that the worst of the worst keep their grip on power and money.  Doing the wrong thing gets you a pat on the back.  “They” will tell you that “we” are exceptional, but that mythology is only floated to keep “them” above the law.  It keeps “them” knocking down doors, burning people alive, and dropping bombs on innocents.  Categorizing a mass of 350 million people as one, as “we”, keeps their power centralized and keeps “us” asking permission for freedom.

            “We” as individuals bring about a very different story.  How do you interact everyday with the people around you?  When you buy groceries, you pull the money out of your wallet and place it in the hands of the person who has been assigned to collect it.  What you don’t do is place a gun to their temple and threaten to murder them unless they give you the food for free.  You don’t threaten to lock them in a cage for twenty years because they didn’t hand over a certain percentage of the store’s goods for nothing simply because you say so.  This is the voluntary world of the individual, where the majority are good people that don’t use aggression to get their way.  Compromise, not force, is used to place food on your dinner table.  The majority of individual’s wants nothing but the best for everyone, but can only know how to get the best for themselves.  Working for you is usually categorized as selfishness, but the individual can only know his or her self, and therefore can only know their needs.  That doesn’t mean their needs don’t involve helping others, but that charity or business can only be legitimate when it’s voluntary.  In the ‘we” as a collective, a person can only be helped by others being harmed, but when “we” are individuals and “we” choose to open our hands then “we” are deciding to help two individuals:  the one you extend your free open hand to, and yourself.  There is a moral benefit for the individual when helping somebody who needs it.  There is absolutely no moral benefit in your labor being forced from you and given freely away by the decision of another.

            “We” as a collective is a bedtime story.  It is a creation.  It is a narrative.  The
“we” of the collective is owned and operated by the politician.  “We” are seen as cattle, herded left and right, with the only outcome of all our woes and all that is fought for being a couple of politician’s names remembered or a couple of fat paychecks being handed out.  It is a lifetime of money being showered upon a person if they made the correct, corrupt decisions for their career while in government.  The “we” of the politician is the “we” of division.  The separation of party or team is a separation not made of many ideas or even simple philosophy; it is the separation of set packages made up of mandates and force.  It is the “we” of one way or the other.  The “we” of the politician is one of segregation.  It is the “we” of separate rights between blacks, gays, woman, etc., and never the rights of the individual.  “We” are on nation, united, unless of course we’re not. 

There is no law in the world of the collective “we.”  Constitutions are just words on paper to throw around so that by the time they hit the ears of the collective, they have lost all meaning.  There are no rules here, only rulers with special powers.  The “we” is “them,” not “us.”  The law is their protection because it is there for them to manipulate.  The real divide that exists is not between you and your neighbor; it is between them and us, rulers and ruled.  They are not here to free you.  They are not here to protect you.  They are not here to save you.  They are here to protect the narrative.  As long as they do, the bad ending that comes with every story they create will mean absolutely nothing, because the narrative has already been set in place. 

“We” will always win no matter how much we actually lose.

February 5, 2013

Theirs and Ours


Theirs and Ours

On the morning of the Sandy Hook Elementary shootings I logged onto Facebook where I saw many friends from Connecticut posting their condolences to the people of Newtown.  I had no idea what happened and thought maybe there was a terrible accident because of snow.  When I went to the Connecticut Post and saw that another school shooting had occurred it felt all the more devastating because it was a town that I grew up next to.  

            I haven’t stepped foot in Newtown in almost five years, and the last time I did I was experiencing a tragedy of my own.  I’ve been regionally disconnected from the area for well over ten years now, but still, my stomach sunk deeper than it had any other time one of these miserable incidents took place.  It’s been a long time since Newtown last passed through my mind, and thinking on it now I never realized the impact it had on my life.  My first job was in Newtown.  It was at Stop and Shop.  I worked there for three years going from carriage-pusher, to cashier, and eventually to working the night stock after graduating high school.  It seemed everyone I worked with on that night crew was much older and had some serious life issues.  That job was a big push for me to pursue a life I wanted, not one I was stuck with.  Newtown is where I bought most of my comic books at a little store by the railroad tracks.  It was called Cave Comics and I can’t tell you how much I loved visiting that place.  There was something mystical built up in my mind about it; maybe the name, or the location (not being in a city area or the mall), the creaky wood floors, the owner’s dog loafing around, or maybe the wall-to-wall comics.  Yeah, it was probably the wall-to-wall comics.  Then there was Edmond Town Hall, the place I saw more movies than anywhere.  It was a second-run movie theater made out of an old town hall (hence the name) that cost two bucks to get in.  I hear they tried to raise the price once and there was outrage by the people of Newtown.  The first time I went to a theater by myself while my parents went out to dinner was at Edmond Town Hall.  I remember going to see Critters 2.  That’s pretty awesome.

Work, comics, and movies.  If this little town didn’t help construct who I am today, I don’t know what did.  And I never thought about that.  I never thought about how many times I traveled the roads to get through Newtown so that I could travel to places like New Milford or Danbury to see friends, or live music at Tuxedo Junction, or drink the many beers of Hat City.  Newtown, Connecticut is also where my older sister eternally sleeps.  The last image I have in my mind of this town is leaving a cemetery in a trail of cars and watching as a much-loved woman waited in her bed to become part of the earth.  

A tragedy made me think of these things.  It made me think of a formative time in my life long gone.  And not so long after thinking these things, even with all these good memories, I came to the conclusion that I don’t know these children that were killed and my only connection to them was a region of the world and the fact that we are human.  My regional connection was closer than most, but even if I was from Georgia or maybe Oregon, I would still claim a regional connection because we were all Americans, and my empathy for the family and friends of those poor people would still hold a place of deep meditation inside. 

Newtown is a place within the trees.  It’s one of those places in Connecticut where it seems like you can only see the sky from an open parking lot, that same sky that children all over the world look at.  Children of different races.  Children of different regions.  Children with parents of different political identities or religions.  But children and human beings nonetheless.

There are towns like Newtown where children are murdered all the time.  They have open skies all around, and in those skies are foreign crafts that fly and spy and kill.  They not only kill people that the American government claims are bad (without any transparency), but they also kill children.  Lots and lots of children.  More than were killed in Newtown or any other school shooting.  And it isn’t just one devastating day, it’s over and over again, for years and years, with no end in sight.  Rather than feeling empathy here in America for these foreign children that are not of our religion, political views, or color, we simply look the other way.  We keep up the charade that it has to be done for our freedoms.  Not only do we reelect the people who commit these crimes, we make excuses for their criminal actions.  We say better theirs than ours…ours.

Shouldn’t the value of a child’s life go beyond the borders of nationalism? 

At a time of great innovation in the world where we can learn anything we want about whomever and wherever for practically nothing, it amazes me how backwards and closed-minded we still are.  People seem to still trust getting information from old institutions that would rather report from state press releases than report the truth of the world.  Emotional reporting that draws us in to the image of a president wiping away invisible tears over children he’s using for political gains.  How did we become wired to not question this action when we should be outraged by his hypocrisy?  We applaud their showmanship like a Michael Bay explosion rather than peeling the layers of their script to expose the crocodile beneath their tears.  It’s a fool’s hope to think that the same creeps that have their grip on the world just want to protect us. 

There is a false privilege in being American.  It stems from the historical privilege of the Europeans and the white race.  Because certain people took ownership of the world before anyone else it didn’t matter who died outside of their region.  And it doesn’t matter now.  It doesn’t matter how young they are, and it doesn’t matter how unconnected to the crime they are being murdered for, because they are not ours.  They are not American.  Whether by bullet, by mass bombing, by drone, or by sanctions, this American government has been involved in the deaths of well over one million people in the last twenty years, and we only ask for more.  Every time a 9/11 or a Sandy Hook happens and we let them lead the conversation and then follow with cries of more control, we acquiesce our natural rights of life and liberty. Every time someone protects taxation they protect violence, because taxation will never be voluntary.  Every time a person votes, they assert their position that they own their neighbors life because their politicians are the right ones to legislate for their well-being. 

Nothing in this world gives me a more sinking or desperate feeling than a scared American.  The irrationality of collectivism that sweeps over this country in times of crisis is much more frightening than any terrorist threat could ever be.  American tyranny and American fascism doesn’t just go away; it grows, it festers, and it imbeds into the culture.

My heart goes out to the families of Sandy Hook.  I hope they can find their place in the world again.  It’s a tough thing when you lose such a huge part of your future.  Most of us know that feeling even if it isn’t a child.  Just as much though, I often think of what it must be like to live in a small village in the Middle East and have fear and stress come over me as a drone passes overhead.  And just as much, I feel for the folks who are going to be hit directly with punishment because of a disturbed young man’s crime.  We don’t know what the new laws will be, but they will definitely inhibit one group’s liberty because another group wants it.  The individual is stomped on once again for the collective.  Of course there will be no actual control of guns.  Criminals will always get them, and the rest will be centralized into the hands of government, the most violent gang in the history of the world.  Once again the monopoly holds strong and the real problems will never be sought out.  There will be no answers.  There will just be stronger prohibition once the next shooting occurs, and the organization we need the most control over will continue to have more control over us.

Newtown is a place from my past.  The few memories I shared could never paint a full picture, but you get an idea of the kind of town it is.  The occupations and police states of the Middle East are constant and in motion.  Most of us are only subjected to one version of that story, and project outright anger and hatred when one tries to present another.  America is a certain kind of place in our history books, but in reality it never was what it was.  The ideal of what it can be is still there, though day by day that is lost more and more.  I’ll be in that little town in Connecticut again someday sitting amongst the peaceful trees and talking to my sister, but the chaos of Sandy Hook will always be prevalent no matter how far back in my mind I try to push it.  That connection can no longer be severed, just like the world cannot be separated from America, and America can no longer be separated from the state. 

Liberty begins within the home, and if the individual loses the right to protect their family, their friends, and their own lives, then all liberty is lost.  What we do overseas, we do out of sight for now.  It always comes home.  In fact the technology, the surveillance, the weapons, and the destruction of civil rights already have.  We only wait for the violence.  Because the state is mayhem.  The state is confusion.  The state cannot change, and will not change.  It will forever be tyranny.  The only change we can ever gain is in the mind of the individual.  The state just needs to go away.