Imagine it's 3:00 in the morning, and drizzling rain. America comes home to a quiet empty house and finds this handwritten letter on the kitchen table:
Dear America,
This is going to be hard for both of us. I don't know how to leave you but I have to. You've changed. You don't see it. It's all secrets and lies and spying on me and you can't even talk about what you've done in the neighborhood -- you just get pissed off when I ask. You come home with blood on your clothes all the time, like that's normal.
Back in the beginning you said so many amazing things about freedom and self-determination and human rights. I believed all that shit. I still do. If you meant it, then you understand, it applies to me too. I want my freedom. I know you'll try to stop me and maybe hurt me. Pretty sad, that's the only game you got left. You could kill me I guess. You could shoot at me and laugh because it makes my body jump and my heart go up in my throat. That's not the same as changing my mind. You're the one who taught my mind to be strong.
When I'm on my own, I'm going to be who I thought you were.
I'll see you around,
Cascadia
almost ready...
"Why use up the forests which were centuries in the making and the mines which required ages to lay down, if we can get the equivalent of forest and mineral products in the annual growth of the hemp fields?" - Henry Ford
Freedom is Choice
Freedom is a quality of activity, not a condition that exists in a vaccum: it is a prize to be won daily, not a possesion that can be kept in the basement and taken out and polished up for parades. Freedom cannot be givin - the most you can hope is to free others from the forces that prevent them from finding it themselves. Real freedom has nothing to do with voting. Real freedom dosen't simply mean being able to choose between options, but actively participating in creating the options in the first place.
the burning bush
There comes a time when the mind takes a higher plane of knowledge but can never prove how it got there. ~Albert Einstein
Voting in elections is an expression of our powerlessness: it is an admission that we can only approach the resources and capabilities of our own society through the mediation of the ruling caste. When we let them prefabricate our options for us, we relinquish controll of our communities to these polliticians in the same way that we have ceeded technology to engineers, health care to doctors, and controll of our living environments to city planners and private real estate developers. We end up living in a world that is alien to us, even though our labor has built it, for we have acted like sleepwalkers hypnotized by the monopoly our leaders and specialists hold on setting the possibilities.
who shall we ask permission to exist?
we don’t care what our detractors say, so long as they refuse to tell the truth. Tell us, Where do we apply for our temporary permit to speak freely?
Democracy is the most sustainable way to maintain the division between powerful and powerless- it gives significant incentives to the greatest possible number of people to defend that division.
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