Down the rabbit hole

Today, we're taking a bit of a field trip from my usual idiocy, into more advanced and useless idiocy. We're taking a trip down the rabbit hole, not chasing a white hare, but chasing something far more elusive, and potentially far more a fever-dream or opium nightmare.

The truth. It's an intangible that the philosophers over the ages have tried to quantify, that humans have fought and died over, that people martyr themselves every day for.

Since I can't write THE TRVTH in the space allotted, we're chasing something a bit more ephemeral, a stray mote in the sunbeam of life.

Every day, people are looking around themselves, as though waking from a daze, and wondering how we got here. We, as a people, are walking zombies, mindless things that see nothing past our next television episode, our current web comic, the next game or distraction. We dehumanize each other, make excuses for each others subjugation, and we think this is normal, as though this insanity is the way things are supposed to be.

There are three truths being sought:

1:) Where the hell are we?
2:) How the hell did we get here?
3:) How the hell do we fix this mess?

Waking up from the dream is painful. We've always been more apt to close our eyes against the pain of truth, and to cling to the delusive, and elusive phantoms that trammel our minds, drawing our minds to distraction.

Where are we? We're in a land where humanity is forgotten even as an ideal, where we as a people forget who we are, our own self-worth, and the essence itself of humanity. We know where we are, we, however, refuse to open our eyes to look at it, preferring the illusion of the perfect car and life to the reality of our own servitude. We walk each day in a daze, one store to another, one advertisement, seeking something fulfilling in our own lives, even as we work away our energy and hours in longer and longer stages seeking the same rewards. We see our retirements fading, our money dwindling, see the crime in the streets and the criminals that are supposed to protect us. Scarcely a day passes in these United States when we do not have some place where the police are acting as military in incursions, where rights are not violated. Even a minute without official, government-sanctioned violations would be an improvement over what we have.

But how did it get here? How the hell did such brutality become commonplace? Is it sanity to assume that becoming more brutal to deal with brutality accomplishes anything but... increasing the brutality? Did we forget the years we spent recovering from the brutality of the shoulder-strikers and fire brigades who chose to go outside the law to 'uphold' it? What happened?

The answer to that lies within the human mind itself. We happened. We allowed small brutalities to prevent larger ones. We decided, deep in our own hearts, that doing small things wrong was all right, after all, it was for the greater good. We allowed ourselves to forget that the real thing worth protecting was our rights, and that the only way to preserve them, was to preserve them for and from others.

Over periods of time, small transgressions enlarged, grew into more powerful transgressions against the law, and then became all-encompassing traps to the unwary. Principle gave way to the letter of convenience, and even to the transgression of the letter of the law into the realm of that which the law forbade. The principle of the matter was the why, not the what. The essence of the matter was the why, not the how. Our preservation of rights were the how... not the why. The why encompassed far more.

We grew numbed to the brutality against our fellow-travellers on this road of life, even as we chose more and more to leave our 'protection' in the hands of others. We chose, for whatever reason, to establish persons to 'protect' us, without ever giving them duty to protect, nor a right within that protection. When the protection failed, or the officers of the 'law' became the agents we needed protection against, what then? More and myriad brutalities, actions against rights, actions against property and the person, actions against the very essence of life and the things to preserve it became commonplace.

We know where we are... and how we got here. How do we get out? How do we change this?

That's the hardest question of all. The answer, however, the single and solitary truth I can find in this question, is one that cannot be easier answered than saying... by exercising the rights. No matter how unpopular that exercise is, no matter how unloved you are for so doing, we must exercise those rights. It is in that exercise that the truth of the matter comes out... that those rights are presented, and preserved as our best security in an uncertain world. We, as a people, have the right to live, and from that right, and that property within the right, comes the right to preserve that life. We have the right to property, which preserves that life, and the property within our labor, which helps support the life. We have the right to liberty, the right to determine by our own hands and our own decisions what that life is to look like and to be. We have the overriding right, from all of these rights, to be treated as equals under the law, and if that right fails, we have the singular, solitary, indefeasible right to abolish the government that would make us servants under the law, and to re-establish it for our mutual benefit, that our rights might be preserved.

We, as a people, have the right, the obligation, and the duty to preserve the rights of others, as well as the responsibility to take the blame when things go wrongly from our lack of such exercise, or misexercise of those rights.

Acts of force can never be anything but acts of force. The government's obligation was to free us of those acts of force by the states, and to preserve for us the benefits of a republican form of government.

It was to preserve for us the capability of recourse without necessity to resort to violence or resistance. The purpose was to preserve for us, for our children and grandchildren into perpetuity those rights which were established, not in our government nor in contract, but within our very being.

It cannot maintain its obligation if we fail to utilize those powers with which we established it.

Think about it for just a moment... would the government fear our possession of arms for our own defense, if they were not something that required defense... against? Could not we, as the people, be educated and trained into the capability of defending our communities, without the necessity for the police force save for investigating crimes?

Do we not possess the power, the authority, and the full might of the government, as it was from us those powers were ceded into other hands?

Can we not still utilize those powers when other hands have failed, in order to restore them to hands that may use them properly?

Think about this: That each and every human being within the United States owes money that they have no true say in the spending of, no real means of repayment, and their labor is charged, their properties are forfeited, and their lives and freedom may be forfeit for their failure to pay a debt... that they did not accede to. Is this consensual, or merely a new means of binding upon us the chains of those who would be our masters?

When we, our children, and our posterity owe a debt that can never be repaid, there is a grave problem.

How deep does the rabbit hole go, my dear Alice? All the way down to the bottom, my dear. All the way down to the bottom.

And yet we support those who would have us spend money to become rich, those who would have us be in debtor's prisons to be free, those who would charge us for feeding ourselves from our own labor, those who would harm us to prevent us from harming ourselves, those who would kill us to preserve us from the pains of life, charge our descendents for our having the temerity of dying, and those who believe themselves more knowledgeable than ourselves in the 'proper' use of our own lives, and choose who reaps the benefits and penalties of our death.

I do not know about you, readers... but I do know something about holes. When you realize you are in one... it's likely best to stop digging, and to look around for the person who is preparing to fill it in atop you.

I may be a total idiot, but I recognize slavery by debt is just another form of involuntary servitude foisted off upon this country in the guise of a benefit. I also recognize that until we realize that it is not supposed to be that way, and until we realize that things don't have to be like this, that things cannot change.

We cannot, and should not go back to the ignorance of the past, nor should we determine that our rights are too dangerous in this day and age... but we should establish and preserve those human rights for the benefit of all in our borders, to preserve them for ourselves. We cannot allow the license of any right, be it the right to live, the right to breathe, the right to choose gainful employment or to employ, the right to stand or fall by our own actions, or the right to defend ourselves from the actions and inaction of others.

Simply because we have made a generation or two of errors, does not mean we need to maintain them.

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