I’ve been writing for a long time now. As far back as I can remember it’s been my ambition. At first I just wanted to write some fantasy story. Something to take people away. Some mystical realm in which people could hide for a while. But I think the real world beat me to the punch.
It’s hard to distinguish fantasy from reality anymore. It seems like we are more often surrounded by fantasy. It is a world of movies and propaganda. Everybody pulling you in one direction or another, trying to make you believe something that they believe. Manipulating you. Breaking you down if you don’t jump to comply.
Lately, I’ve found myself looking more to reality to escape than fantasy. I’ve been taking comfort in the knowledge that there is such a thing as accountability. You aren’t free to do whatever you want. There are consequences to your actions even when you or your friends or a whole society fails to see them. Those things build up, the little acts of hatred you perform without thinking linger around you. One day they stand up and strike you down. There are consequences. There have always been consequences. Consequences remain. The only thing different now is that we don’t help each other to stay clear of the path that accrues such an ugly debt. We take the moment rather than the future. We justify everything.
Self-justification.
We aren’t as big as we think we are. We will never be.
A year and a half ago I decided that I had to leave America. The glitz and the glamour was getting to be to much for me. The irritating whine of the press. The constant waste and over-indulgence. The pompous attitude of superiority.
But mostly it was the propaganda. The propaganda was becoming more than I could fight.
It is impossible to walk down the streets of America for five seconds without being attacked by some visual or auditory assault on your thinking. There is music playing and posters flying by on the walls of buildings or on cars and buses. There are giant posters on billboards and television sets suspended in the air, all of which are programmed with pro-American propaganda.
They all tell you how great America is. They are all patting themselves on the back. But the troubling thing about it is that there is no substance, there is only enthusiasm.
Everything is all artistic and fine printed and beautiful. The movies are all well-crafted and magnificent creative achievements. There are no superficial flaws. They’re all perfect. No comma errors, no misspelled words.
But there is no soul. And you always know what is going to happen. Every magazine article is going to say the same thing. Every movie is going to have the same ending. There is a standard as to how these stories should appear and if any artistic or creative endeavor fails to stand up to that standard it is buried under an intense and furious public assault.
There is very little tolerance in America for new ideas.
The land that upholds freedom above all things does not champion it.
Frankly, in my experience, the general trend is to stomp out differing ideas like a cancer.
It is both humorous and tragic that the first nation in the history of humanity to actually implement a government based on freedom would eventually allow itself, through laziness, to deteriorate into a tyrannical state.
Because that’s what it is.
The newspapers, the novelists, the television stations, the radio stations, every public figure knows that there is only one pathway of thought that is acceptable.
They believe that what American society has achieved, up to this moment, is perfect and unquestionable. They believe those that question it are not seeking to improve the state of the world, but are trying to destroy what cannot be improved upon.
The problem is that the people who are leading this charge aren’t as smart as they think they are. You never shut the door. That’s the first rule. You must always allow the possibilities.
Every single door, in every single room must be left open a crack. Sure it isn’t quite so safe and secure, but the wind can get in. The air doesn’t get trapped and turn old or stale.
It really is amusing to watch the self-proclaimed champions of liberty gleefully enact a path of action that limits whole worlds of freedoms all under the guise of protecting the American way. More often than not they get medals for it in the end.
It’s an embarrassment now. After a year I can finally see it. Things are bad. Detestably bad, though most of the people living in America would recoil in shock for me having said that. They would react as if I’m certifiably insane.
But sometimes badness is hard to see.
If you had been living in the country in France during Nazi occupation, you might not have noticed much of a change. I think we all have images in our minds from movies or from other nonsense propaganda that when evil conquers there is a dark cloud hanging over everything.
Not true, the sun still shines. People go about their days. There is no influence strong enough to willfully hold every reasoning being under sway.
But the rot is there, and it will make its presence felt eventually. It will eat away at the foundations and one day, out of the blue, the whole structure will come tumbling down to the ground. Floor by floor collapsing and transforming into an enormous cloud of dust in something less than an instant.
And all the idiots will cry when it happens. The same idiots who had been gnawing and sawing at the tresses during their infancy and their idleness.
There is a rot in America. It has set in deeply. You can see it when children come to schools and gun down their classmates. You can see it when the president rigs the election and the proud citizens say nothing. Hell, you can see it when Martin Scorcese continues to fail to win an Academy award for best director.
Or I can see it anyway.
It is all out of idleness or laziness or pacification. The masses are content to sit there and watch these things happen without any concern to their implications or ramifications. Consequences! Nobody wants to rock the boat and keep it on its course.
They all have too much to lose. Even the young people. Everybody is trained from a very early age to know that all you have to do is have faith, accept the standard, and tow the line and you will have a good job and a good home and a good family. You will have all the things that hundreds of generations of people could never have dreamed of having.
All you’ve got to do is shut up and go along with it.
I can’t tell you how much I’ve been pressured to just stop questioning the things that keep nagging me as false.
Everywhere, here and there, all these little things along the way.
How many people are unsatisfied with this magnificent line they keep trying to sell us?
How many people have dedicated their lives to the dream only to find it empty and hollow?
That’s all I see around me. Looking forward to my peers, to the people I’m expected to admire and trust and follow and listen to. They’re all miserable hollow shells. They repeat the doctrine they’ve been forced to memorize with sad and cloudy eyes.
Go to college. Accrue a debt. Get a job. Buy a house. Spend the next thirty years paying off your mortgage. Find your joy in your wife and your kids. Maybe you can buy a fishing boat for the weekends. Oh yeah, and there are also movies and cable TV.
Fuck that shit.
FUCK....THAT....SHIT!
Rule one, I will follow nobody but me. Repeat that to yourself. At least then, if it doesn’t work out, you know who to blame. Even self-loathing can get you a long way. A hell of a lot farther than some promised hand-out for twenty years of dedication and corporate loyalty that inevitably goes forever unpaid.
But what else is there if you forge your own way? Most people lack the guts to even consider it. There have been more nights than one in which I have woken up fearing that I was a fool, that I had cashed in my chances for any kind of happiness..
Wouldn’t it be nice to settle down? To believe in your culture? To build your house, to have your family, to raise your children in a government that you knew to be just?
Yes it would. And most people will live the fantasy even if the reality doesn’t measure up to the dream.
That’s like staying in an abusive marriage.
But I just can’t do it. If I’m going to have kids it has to be in an environment that I believe in. It has to be in a world I have respect for, with people who are willing to take accountability for themselves and accept the consequences of their actions. And I don’t care if that is a hard line to take, we’re talking about my children here and their needs come first to me, even if they aren’t born, even if they never will be.
But there was a time a couple of months ago that I was really starting to doubt myself. I was getting a lot of flack for the opinions that I had expressed on the internet and in books. People were putting pressure on me. Complete strangers and my family. And I thought to myself that maybe I was wrong. Maybe I was being too harsh. I was ready to capitulate. To suck it up and go back into the current.
Then we invaded Iraq and the propaganda started again. I saw the things the newspapers printed in America versus what was being said by foreign journalists without vested interests.
The American papers make a conscious choice not to tell the truth in a responsible way. They sway it, maybe for money, maybe out of fear of the American public, I don’t know. But the bias is so great that they don’t even give the masses the chance to make up their own minds.
I saw people protesting America. People from all over the world. Smart people, both old and young. Concerned people. And I really felt grateful to have seen it. It was really rewarding to know that there are millions of human beings that think the same way that I do. Millions who are desperately concerned with what America is becoming. Millions who I could go to for support and to maybe build a home and a family and join a culture.
So after seeing that I felt re-enforced, but I’m not yet done. I can’t go there yet. There is too much America in me. Too much to understand. Too much culture and belief that I have been implanted with and did not chose.
Too much propaganda to purge.
And when you reject that conditioning you have to start again from scratch. I have to build myself back up, still looking for some sort of path. It is a daunting task, something hundreds of generations of human beings have never had to deal with. Hundreds of generations with strong families to rely on and needs like food and shelter to keep them grounded. We’re out in the ether, wondering where we’re going to land.
I turned to reality for my escape. Bit by bit, step by step. Looking for whatever is at the core. The human part. The part that I can trust. The part that makes me want to work and earn my way rather than pad my luxury by firing missiles and stealing oil.
And I’m finding that hard work is the task that fills the void. The same work so many Americans think is undignified. You’ve got to get your hands dirty. You’ve got to smell the earth and remember where you came from, and where you’re going.
I came down to Peru to escape the propaganda, but I haven’t come to any answers yet. I’m still floundering mightily. I wouldn’t presume to preach to anybody how it must be done.
There are highs, and there are lows. This is what I have exchanged for the steady equilibrium of American life. There is more difficulty and less comfort. This is what I have lost.
But what I have gained is the hope of substance, a hard surface to rest my feet on. Can you measure the value of that?
Without having experienced it, I guess you really can’t.
The End