Impugning Impunity

I hold these truths to be self-evident; they all suck, they hate us, and they think we are stupid.

If you have somehow avoided the incessant drumbeat of hate, anger, vitriol, and an endless Litany of lies and half-truths coming at us like a fire hose, consider this notification that a national election is going to take place in less than 3 weeks. As we begin, I would first like to congratulate you on being able to avoid the firehose and ask you to share your secret someday.

What follows will not be about candidates, policy proposals, empty promises, or any sort of cloaked attempt to encourage you to vote. Remember, as an independent who has been participating in elections for five decades, I "hold these truths to be self-evident; "they all suck, they hate us, and they think we are stupid. Personally, I only care about your participation in the upcoming elections if you do so after thorough research, deep and somber reflection, and a commitment to do everything in your power - with your own two hands - to justify your decision by actively participating in whatever mess you actively volunteer to help make by casting your vote or get involved in helping to clean up.

Because I have just published what I like to call Thomas Paine's Common Sense 2.0 (you can buy a copy for $6 here), I offer for your consideration the first of two prescient quotes that apply today every bit as much as they did two and a half centuries ago. First, on the cannibalistic nature of the relationship between government and Society, consider this: "Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a country without government, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer."

In modern-day America, with a population just south of 400 million people, our current system of governance is far more aristocratic than it is democratic. It is also incredibly more hostile toward the rank and file citizen than it has ever been, and many of the people who have benefited and enriched themselves by taking advantage of the freedoms and liberties promised by our constitution are putting their wealth, power, and station in society to use by manipulating elections and the national conversation to maintain superior status over the rank and file American citizen.

The presidential campaigns for the Democrat and the Republican will spend well north of a billion dollars each attempting to convince us we need to give them our vote. $1 billion each. The down-ballot campaigns combined will be many more billions of dollars than we will probably ever find out about.

Yet for all that money changing hands between donors and advertisers, and a corrupt media complex (social and corporate) and the marketing ecosystem, not one single starving child will be fed, homeless family housed, or criminal taken off the street. Not one immigrant child will be protected from being raped or sexually trafficked. Not one immigrant woman will be spared the chains of a life of addiction and sexual slavery, and neither will one molecule of our planet's atmosphere be made better.

As it has been, in my lifetime at least, when the elections are over, posters, placards, and junk mail disposed of, and our political Heroes sworn into office, the rest of us get back to the business of working, providing for our families, and handing over our tax dollars for these people to live a life of luxury - on our dime - and set about the business of doing as little as they have to on the promises they made in the campaign while the rest of us struggle to make ends meet. It's a pretty good gig (professional politician), if you think about it, and the second Paine quote says it best: "Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise. For were the impulses of conscience clear, uniform, and irresistibly obeyed, man would need no other lawgiver; but that not being the case, he finds it necessary to surrender up a part of his property to furnish means for the protection of the rest; and this he is induced to do by the same prudence which in every other case advises him out of two evils to choose the least. Wherefore, security being the true design and end of government, it unanswerably follows that whatever form thereof appears most likely to ensure it to us, with the least expence and greatest benefit, is preferable to all others."

A week from now, after more thorough research and deep and somber reflection, I will post again on this slow-motion head-on collision the American people are racing toward. I suggest you, dear reader, do likewise; like no other time in recent memory, the 2024 election is the most consequential we could possibly imagine.

All at once, our ruling Authority has facilitated the dumbing down of the voting public while, at the same time, demanding of us that we take them at their word and accept their heavy hand in manipulating and controlling the information we are allowed to receive or share with others. We are discouraged from asking questions, assured that Foreign Wars and International affairs are too complicated for us to understand, economic difficulties are under control, and we just need to trust them and take them at their word.

Consider, in the coming days, the breathtaking levels of impunity with which news outlets, campaign commercials, thought leaders and aspiring politicians Hold Us in their regard. If you like what these people are doing, go back to sleep until election day. If you don't, some in the strength to educate yourself about what is at stake before it's too late.