I want off the ride. Make no mistake, I love life and my family and the beauty of pursuing wild and incredible adventure, but this American Tilt-o-whirl that has no operator, no off button and spins us past a pile of razor sharp bureaucratic papers, that over the course of this inescapable ride will kill our spirits and eventually our beating hearts, is an intolerable awfulness.
The social contract is only adhered to by one party - we the people. The other party in the contract, the government, has paraded around with its middle finger in the air at us for my entire adult life. They march us towards war, spend us into oblivion, and manage us with threat of missing a jot or tittle on our paperwork. Everything takes far more energy than it should. We spend more time on the inefficiencies of living in a governed life, than the supposed safety and security it was designed to bring about.
We are over taxed, over regulated, over burdened all to supposedly support a government by and for the people. But its a farce. We participate in all of this in some kind of inherited heritage of American pride and love of country - but we never ask:
“What if our government hates us?”
There’s a cruelty in what the government has become. It dislikes its citizens. It won’t listen to our grievances, or our pleas for rational responses to the over burdensome pile of horribleness that is placed upon our backs. We are the problem to them - an unmanaged mess that is the scourge upon their ability to create utopia. Life, after all, is much better at the French Laundry if you don’t have to compete with the plebes for a place at your divinely inherited table.
This moment is awful. We are the only ones playing by the rules. If someone side swipes your vehicle and doesn’t have insurance it’s ok by the government as long as that someone was here on behalf of achieving the end goals for them. If you on the other hand have a momentary lapse of coverage because of a late payment or a clerical error, you will spend the next miserable months of your life fighting to keep your car on the road and your transportation for making a living possible.
If you fail to pay your payroll tax as an employer watch out. The authorities will be there with their pencils and fine books to make sure you know what kind of criminal you are. But live under the table and keep your Venmo transactions under $600 and no one will say a thing.
Accidentally have a required labor poster fall off the wall and the tablet checking, officious government babe will have you clapped in paperwork jail for the next 6 months. But pay off the politician in that district through a campaign donation and strangely the fine and punishment will be memory holed.
Complain about your city being overwhelmed by adding a third of what your population was in a completely foreign culture to yours, and you are racist, bigoted, and the bad guy. Ask about why your tax dollars go to fund such an import and the bureaucrats will be marched out to pronounce that no such thing has happening. Oh good. We can be so relieved, the pencil pusher says its not happening, so I can ignore my lying eyes. It would be nice if it were gaslighting, but this is blowtorching. They have such disdain for us that in their eyes there's not a suffering too great for us to live under.
They start the obedience indoctrination early. Kids in school are told how to manage their way into the life of paperwork. They kill innovative thinking and curiosity. They tell them the answers they need to repeat so they can get their reward. The process is intended to create compliance - and if there’s anything that provides them liberation like getting a drivers license, the government will make sure that the hurdles get higher and higher by the generations so that they are taught from early on that there’s a group in charge and your compliance to their order is the only way to survive. Every time the individual moves towards liberty, they are confronted with another bureaucratic beat down in a maze of wandering and conflicting rules of the game so that we eventually acquiesce to their brilliance and brutality.
I have come to hate this America. I hate the kind of government that has been made.
I love the idea of individual liberty and the right to self government - the idea of America is beautiful and good. But that America is dead. It’s a nice idea filled with old paintings and temples in the capitol to what once was - but what’s left of it as it relates to a good government has been destroyed, and I fear is unrecoverable.
This dark and sinister web that supposedly is there to stabilize the world and keep us out of global catastrophic wars by making sure we’ve complied with their paperwork, even at the lowest level, is collapsing under its own weight of miserableness. There is a reality to the fact that our people are more sick, more poisoned, more bombarded with toxins and self inflicted medical experiments than ever. The phones we carry in our pockets are our own pleasure packed ankle monitors. The shots and pills we get from the doctors are designed to keep us in the medical system that ceased healing decades ago and became intent on padding their pockets.
The media or whatever you want to call it is entirely captured for the propaganda of the government. They feed our feeds with the news they allow us to hear. To agitate us just enough to keep the illusion alive that we have some say in the matter. They push with endless repetition the words and images they need us to see to keep us moving towards their dream of a managed society. They vilify their villains and venerate their heroes - all of which is an upside down theater of twisted reality. The good is bad and the bad is good. Say it enough times and dance to it in a Tik-Tok video and soon enough you can believe it too.
Maybe theres a place out there where you can escape it. Maybe there’s some tiny village in Switzerland 0r Argentina where you might be able to be left alone. But there’s an insatiable nagging at my mind that those are illusions too. The United States will follow you everywhere you go. Even if you tried to get off the ride, the ride is the act of living. Our government meddles in everything - they watch everything. Our government pushes to make sure that you can’t escape it, even if you try. They actively hate the people of this world. We make a mess and so they just keep pressing like a tyrannical parent to beat us into submission. Not with guns or military strength just yet - but with condescension, and paperwork, proxy wars, and objectively obvious disdain for us.
I’m tired of it. I wanted a non-violent change to the trajectory, but the more we push the more they drive people into extreme ideology. They poke at people over and over and hope that they just comply. They know they can outlast us. They have unlimited money, unlimited time, the force of the police and the military at their disposal and they can quickly make an example out of any of us. Just ask the souls rotting in a prison without trial for their antics on January 6th, or Edward Snowden or Ross Ulbricht. They know that they can manage us by punitive proxy and their meddling minions. Maybe by even saying this out loud, I’ll be up for an audit by the Internal Revenue Service, just to make me stop saying stuff. It likely won’t matter any way, there will be about 7 people that see this because of my banishment to platform jail that they use as the first form of control and punishment.
I want to remain positive - to tell my children theres always a future in America, but I don’t know if I believe it anymore. Sure, we can accumulate junk and cheap clothing from our corporate masters, but are we better off? Are we healthier? Wiser? Kinder? More free? By all measures, we are not.
It’s difficult to keep at it - to push for an outcome of change. The candidates we do support who we think might make a difference are smashed out of competing by a vicious law system and corrupt political class that isn’t a close proximity to equal justice or democracy. We can’t actually vote for anyone we might want to. That’s the most egregious form of disobedience to the masters of war. So we have to go back to our compliant little lives, ordering cheap imported goods from the online monopolies, buying garbage food with garbage dollars and filling out all the paperwork thats required to be alive.
As I said, I want off the ride - but it does not appear that option is available any longer.
Essay 74 - Death By Paper Cut