Category: tyranny

Inevitabilities

What do you do on the day taxes are due? Do you rail against an inevitable evil that you feel powerless to stop? Or do you shrug and say this is the price we pay for peace and freedom?

Peace? When the money wrested from our labors or printed out of thin air goes to build weapons that can extinguish us in a blink and to fund wars and proxy wars all over the world?

Freedom? When our every word and action is surveilled and documented and regulated?

Either we were born free or we were not. We may have been born into bondage or dragged into subservience or coaxed into surrender, but we were indeed born free — if nowhere else, then between our temples. No shackles can bind our minds as long as there exists a spark, and woe to the despot who ignites that spark.

Anything — power, technology, even the tools of peace — in the wrong hands can be subverted to evil, and the wrong hands are in charge of the apparatus.

This is the price we pay for allowing the wrong hands to creep into control. It’s possible we are powerless to stop them. It’s also possible that we can creep back into control of our lives.

Look to names like Thoreau and Gandhi and King. That’s what I do, on the day taxes are due: I pay my bill and study their wisdom. 

Mad world

© Ruslan Gilmanshin | Dreamstime.com

The ruler of the universe as we know it sat behind a desk cogitating. All was going as planned. The usual suspects had been rounded up, and now all that was necessary was to draft charges to justify the roundup.

An aide simpered into the room — Chad was his name, wasn’t it?

“My Ruler, I humbly apologize, but I don’t understand why we are rounding these people up.”

The Ruler stared icily into the aide’s eyes.

“There is much you don’t know about these people, or you wouldn’t be asking that question.”

“All I’ve been able to learn is that they don’t agree with your policies on —“

“And isn’t that enough?” the Ruler snapped. “They are evil people who stand in the way of our glorious plans to save the people from themselves.”

“They have the same goals as you, they just have different ideas about how to accomplish them.”

“You dare to question my plan?”

“No, no, of course not. But they do,” said the aide. “Some of them are good people, they just disagree —“

“Good people do not block the doors of the feeding house so others cannot eat.”

“Yes, but they’re not doing that —“

“Don’t you know these are greedy people who want to keep all the food for themselves?”

“They’ve never said —“

“If I had the power, I would wipe their selfish faces from the earth.”

“They only disagree with you! They’re not horrible people.”

The Ruler paused in mid-rant and looked more carefully at the aide.

“How did you get in here? What fool hired you, of all people, to be one of my advisors?”

“Are you kidding, Ruler? You picked me, you brought me on board, we’ve been friends for as long as I can remember.”

“Yes, I recall now,” said the Ruler. “You’ve changed so much, I hardly recognize you.”

“What, me, change? Of course not. I helped draft the plan, I just don’t understand why we have to arrest all these innocent people.”

“INNOCENT?! Is that what you call those who object to the glorious plan?”

“They are conscientious objectors, not revolutionaries.”

“And you know this how? Have you joined them after all this time?”

The aide appeared to want to speak, but chose to be silent.

“How may I serve my Ruler today?” the aide said after a long silence. 

“By reporting to the guard outside the door and having him escort you to processing,” the Ruler said. “I’m so disappointed in you, Chad.”

“It’s Brad,” the aide said. “But it doesn’t matter.”

About those bioweapons

I remember when you were a racist or a Russian stooge if you believed the Wuhan virus escaped from a laboratory. Three years later, it turns out you just had your eyes open.

In all of the discussion over whether it did or didn’t, I don’t recall any discussion about the main question I would ask about that lab.

Why? Why does it exist?

Why is anyone studying “gain of function” virology — that is to say, why is anyone studying ways to make viruses more deadly? What monsters would weaponize disease?

Life is short and often cruel. Why study how to make it shorter and crueler?

I’m relieved that people have finally come to their senses enough to realize that if a pandemic has its roots in the same town as a bioweapons laboratory, the lab probably had something to do with it. 

But I’m discouraged by the thought that someone took leave of their senses and convinced enough other people to build and equip a place where diseases are stored against the day when they can be deployed against human beings.

I have no illusions “they” are the only ones conducting such studies. I am fully confident that “we” operate a bunch of these hellish laboratories. The quotation marks are because I don’t believe such insanity belongs either to “us” or to “them.” Normal people don’t think or behave like the sociopaths who claim to rule us.

Someday, I hope and pray, humans will be better than this.

When reality blocks out once upon a time

I tried starting this entry “It was the morning of June 17, 2054,” and continuing from there, just to make it clear I was attempting fiction. On that day 31 years from now, this body — wherever it is and in what condition — will be 101 years and nearly three months old, and where “I” will be is a topic for philosophers and theologians, so the post wouldn’t be confused with nonfiction.

But fiction is not coming to me today. I spent too much of the morning reading and reflecting about the last three, or seven, or 20 years, when it constantly has felt like politicians, along with willing and unwitting accomplices in my business of journalism, were offering up fiction as facts — weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Russian tampering with U.S. elections, a virus so virulent that our only hope was to shut down business and industry, a “vaccine” that could prevent the disease — err, keep the disease from spreading — ummm, make the virus less virulent.

The line between fiction and non-fiction is so blurred that Nineteen Eighty-Four seems less a horror story than a training manual for our contemporary leaders. We have always been at war with Eastasia, after all, and if you remember that yesterday we were friends with Eastasia and at war with Eurasia, well, that was just Eastasian bots feeding you misinformation.

And so I write about “the real world” even though I’d rather write fiction. What wonder I might accomplish if I stopped wishing I was doing something else and instead focused on the needs of the here and now. I probably would find that the moment required these non-fiction words rather than a fanciful tale. But I do need to do some serious once-upon-a-timing soon.

I Heard the Bells

It was a lovely Christmas weekend with family and rest and recharging, and as I contemplated going back to work, a sort of melancholy settled over me. 

I found myself thinking of the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem that was reworked into a Christmas carol, “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day.” Longfellow wrote the poem in 1863 during the U.S. Civil War, and despite its optimistic conclusion, the poem’s penultimate stanza remains the money quote:

“And in despair I bowed my head;

“There is no peace on earth,” I said;

“For hate is strong,

And mocks the song

Of peace on earth, good-will to men!”

In the final stanza, Longfellow asserts that the living God will see to it that “The Wrong shall fail, the Right prevail, with peace on earth, good-will to men.” But almost 160 years after it was written, hate is still strong and still mocks the call for peace.

Sometime between Nov. 1 and Thanksgiving Day, the air becomes filled with the familiar songs of the season, singing joy to the world and tidings of comfort and joy. Come Dec. 26 the songs are all packed away and forgotten, and we go back to the nihilism and back-biting and hate-thy-neighbor norm.

And there’s the reason for my melancholy: I’d so much rather press for peace and good-will on earth, and it’s frustrating to see how much power is wielded by the forces who prefer to see us at each other’s throats.

One of these days it would be lovely to see people rise up and just say “no” to the bottom feeders who spend their days building weapons to kill as many people as possible in one fell swoop, who concoct arguments to convince us that certain people deserve to have those weapons trained against them, and who stand by silently while the hate mongers rage away.

How many “nos” will it take to achieve peace on earth? I say we try and find out.

10 reasons to celebrate freedom

Digging into the archives again; I first posted this Dec. 15, 20217, five years ago today … stay tuned for a postscript.

A long time ago in a land of hope and plenty, a perfect union was formed. But after a few years people got together to try again, declaring the new arrangement was “a more perfect union.”

Even at that, they perceived something was missing from their founding document. They made 10 additions.

On Dec. 15 each year, we celebrate Bill of Rights Day in honor of the added words that enhanced the founding document and cemented the ideals of this more perfect union.

1. We have the freedom to tap into the Power of the universe as we see fit, to speak and publish our views, to gather together in peace, and even to petition the government to right a perceived wrong, all without fear that some agent of the government will interfere with these freedoms.

2. We have the freedom to defend our lives and property against aggression and to be prepared for such defense.

3. We have the freedom to decide who can live in our homes.

4. We have assurance that government agents have to have a good reason before they search or seize us or our property.

5. We have the freedom to decline an invitation to confess our sins, even when we didn’t actually do it. The government has to spell out what we’re accused of doing, it can’t put us on trial for the same alleged offense more than once; and if it wants to use our property for some “public purpose,” it has to pay us a fair price for it first.

6. If we’re accused of a crime, we have a right to have the matter resolved as quickly as possible, to know exactly what it is we’re supposed to have done, to have a jury of local people decide the facts, to face the person(s) who says we did it, to be able to bring witnesses who say we didn’t, and to have a lawyer help us defend ourselves.

7. We have the right to have a jury decide private disagreements, too.

8. The government isn’t allowed to set bail or fines that are way too high, and if we’re found guilty the punishment can’t be cruel or unusual.

9. We have many other freedoms and rights, and just because they’re not covered in the first eight points doesn’t mean they don’t exist.

10. On the other hand, if the founding document doesn’t specifically say the federal government has the power to do something, then it doesn’t – those powers belong to the state governments – or to us.

Of course, these are ideals. Every day brings new evidence that we do not live in a utopia where these principles are honored. But at least the vision was declared – set in stone, even – so that we may compare the vision against the reality and resolve to improve the reality.

That’s what we celebrate on Bill of Rights Day. Be happy; be free.

P.S. Back here in 2022, I always feel obligated to emphasize that these are described as “constitutional rights” but they were not created by the Constitution. Rather, these are more of the “certain, unalienable rights” that were mentioned in the Declaration of Independence, and the Bill of Rights doubles down on the assertion that governments are founded to protect (“secure”) these rights, not restrict them.

Chew on that thought the next time your “elected representative” suggests creating another link for the chains.

Still not quite a novelist

The 12 print-on-demand books of which I currently claim authorship include only two novels, The Imaginary Bomb and The Imaginary Revolution. Friday, Dec. 15, Bill of Rights Day 2022, will be the 10th anniversary of the latter’s publication.

The Imaginary Revolution (Here’s the ebook)(Here’s the paperback) is told in the first person by Raymond Douglas Kaliber, who shares his memoir of the events that led to the establishment of the Commonwealth of Sirius IV based on the concept of anarkhia, that is to say, a society without a formal government. I have started more than a half-dozen novels, and The Imaginary Revolution is distinctive among them mainly because I finished it.

I like L. Neil Smith’s comment that he wishes they had called it the Bill of Limitations, rather than the Bill of Rights, because the latter implies that the document defines or grants certain rights when, in fact, it places limits on government’s ability to abridge rights that already existed long before. The Constitution and the Bill of Rights did not create the right to free speech, or bear arms, or trial by jury, or peaceful assembly — they declare that those rights may not be restricted by authoritarian busybodies posing as friends of the greater good.

One of my favorite chapters in The Imaginary Revolution, if I may, is Chapter 58, which I quote here in its entirety:

With the toppling of the reigning council, the question — seemingly inevitably — became: What sort of government shall we have now?

I hoped my grin did not seem too mischievous as I answered the question with my own question:

“Why do we need a government at all?”

A decade later, as I watch authoritarian governments — from the other side of the globe to down the highway from here — press harder and harder on people’s throats, I really must say, I still think that’s a good question.

Happy anniversary, Mr. Kaliber.