Once upon a time, I believed the hype about America being the greatest country ever. In fact, the founding ideals were pretty astounding, in that a country that free had never been tried before, at least since the creation of the modern nation-state.
The dream went bust on Halloween afternoon 1981. I had just spent about a year and a half backpacking around the world. I was 19, and with that experience in my hip pocket, I could call myself a worldly guy. I had seen quite a bit of life and the world, having my passport stamped in 37 countries on three continents. In all that time and in all those places, I pretty much had a free ride through immigration. About the hardest time was getting out of Morocco, because I smoked Marlboros, which implied that I was a hash smoker. Long story that.
Anyway, I looked a bit scruffy, sure, but that's to be expected after such an adventure. My beard and hair had grown pretty long, and I had a pretty severe sunburn from a nude beach in Australia, so I wasn't able to bathe before jumping on the plane home.
At immigration, the jerk at the counter was passing folks through with nary a glance at them, most being foreigners. When I got to the counter, he spent 20 minutes looking at my photo and then at me, asking me questions about why I had been out of the country for so long. I mean real second-degree kind of questions. I, of course, having been raised a Texian and with a strong foundation in history, politics and law, was not about to answer any of them, and said so.
Finally, the jerk pointed at a side bench and said, "See that man over there? He likes people with beards."
I muttered something rude under my breath, calling the jerk's paternity into question and implying that the other fellow's sexual orientation might have something to do with his affinity for beards.
I stepped to the second counter where I got more questions about where I had been and why. I quoted Edmund Hillary and left it at that. Jerk 2, being dissatisfied with my disdain for jackboots proceeded to completely dismantle my backpack, which (after a year and a half) was a masterpiece of intricate packing.
His grinned the whole time, as he literally undid every single item in the pack and threw it on the floor. I made some comment about the obvious similarities to Nazi Germany and how I had been much freer outside the US than I was just momets after arriving on my home soil. Figured I had nothing to lose, since the bastard was determined to make as big a mess of my possessions as he could. My only crime was having dared to go abroad for an extended leave and brazenly defending my right not to answer intimate questions about it.
That was 1981, and from that point on, I know precisely what tyranny was. I hadn't found it in any other country on my travels, save East Germany. It was still decades before TSA would be created, but the foundation was already there.
Quite a few years later, while I was involved with the Texas secessionist effort, some group came out with a study showing that every single American, big and small, was controlled by more than 20,000 laws the minute they rolled out of bed in the morning. Who could possibly follow the law when there were so many? I noticed the headline the other day that 40,000 new laws took effect on January 1. Not counting all the years and laws in between, that's 60,000 laws governing your life.
That can only mean one thing...no human being who lives in America can go through a normal day without breaking some laws. It's impossible with that many laws in effect. At some point, you're going to trim your nails the wrong way, or use the wrong light bulb or use too much water in your morning flush.
I have to say, that's pretty much insane.
The most egregious part of all that is the NDAA, euphemistically called the National Defense Authorization Act. It literally declares every man, woman and child who has US citizenship to be enemies of the US. At any point, and for any arbitrary reason, you can be declared an enemy combatant, stripped of your citizenship and imprisoned and tortured without legal representation or even notification of next of kin. You just vanish into a Kafka-esque nightmare.
Back in the day, when the evil commies were sending folks off to psychiatric hospitals for 'rendition,' they came across a rather stalwart fellow named Alexander Solzhenitsyn. They tried every trick in the book, but could not break him. Finally, he was asked why this was so. He simply answered that they had already taken everything of value from him, so he had nothing left to lose.
These are dangerous times. When you have 300 million people with nothing left to lose, great upheavals in history tend to result. Sad to say, this will probably not end well. The record gun sales before Christmas speak to a great many folks taking things pretty seriously, regardless of who they envision will be at the business end of those guns.
The real answer to this situation is so much more pleasant. The US has reached this point because their culture has been corrupted by the controllers. The simplest and most effective answer is to take it back. It's a time for folks to start creating new art, new music and new literature, but keep it out of the corporate grist mills. Instead, start distributing it on the net, passing out CDs, printing up books and trading them at fairs. Create beauty and pleasant things and refuse to let the corporations feed off of it. Keep it at the real level.
We teeter now at the brink. The number of similarities between the US and Nazi Germany are eerie. The Enabling Act and the Patriot Act, the SS and the TSA, the Reichtstag fire and 9.11. Even the US wars shadow Germany's 'lebensraum,' with blitzkrieg replaced by 'shock and awe.' An ominous black cloud is drawing down on North America. Both periods in history center around global economic depressions. There's no escaping the historical rerun, but there is still an opportunity to change the course of events.
The election of Ron Paul presents an interesting possibility. It would force the shadow elite into the open. They have already exposed their media manipulations because of him. We are likely to see blatant fraud at the polls. If he wins, They will be forced to kill him or watch all their plans and machinations set back decades, if not centuries. That 70% of all donations from military and federal employees are going to Ron Paul is very telling.
It's as if the world is holding its collective breath. The masks are off and all sides can see who is really behind them now. It's just a matter of time before someone blinks, and when they do, all hell will break loose. The question is, which side? It's a foregone conclusion that the side who shoots first will lose. The damnedable part is that the US government is doing everything it can to provoke just about everyone in the world, including its own citizens. It is itching for a fight, but so far, no one will give it any satisfaction, and if it starts the fight, it will lose all credibility, though it has precious little remaining.
Profound changes are coming, even more so than those already past. Without a doubt, the side of evil and tyranny has already lost. It always does, but it never fails to keep trying. Insanity is a sad thing to witness. The rules are different this time around, though. No side has a fall-back position. It will be an all or nothing fight. What we on the good side must realize is that we can't succumb to their tactics. We must do something completely different.
We must take back the culture. We must extract ourselves from the means by which they control us, and that is done with media of all types. We must find alternative channels to communicate and educate and entertain. We must boycott the TeeVee and the movies and the radio. We must completely ignore all the avenues by which they project power into our lives.
Every eyeball, every eardrum, every taste bud becomes a weapon against our own minds and souls. Only by shutting them out completely can we hope to dismantle their ivory towers. If we unite, not in war or protest, but in truth and beauty and unity, we can destroy them without a single shot being fired or noose being strung. Just stop listening.
If no one listens to their talking heads, if no one buys their music, if no one reads their books, if no one goes to their movies, it will kill them as surly as any weapon. If we create our own counter-culture and refuse to let them usurp it, it will cause them to wither and die. Support bands who don't want a recording contract. Read books that don't have major publishers. Watch movies that aren't distributed by the major studios. Better yet, create your own and share it with your friends.
It's a strange concept and it seems all too simple. But it is, and it works. The 1960s in America was a radical time because the counter-culture was out of Their control. It didn't take long, though, for Them to absorb it by greed and avarice. They only win because we play their game.
It's time to change the rules.
