so true. why would anyone have ever trusted the government? even the framers of the government warned you against trusting them and did their best to limit their power going forward because they knew they couldn't be trusted!
no, the heartbreaking part was seeing how your "friends" and "relatives" behaved, realizing that they would have all volunteered to load jews onto boxcars for brownie points back in the day, learning that the people you would have trusted with your life probably couldn't be trusted with your cat, that you had friends of 30, 40 years duration who you will probably never speak to again, that the job you loved with a passion (and rearranged your entire life so you could do it until you dropped dead) really assumed that you would just quietly comply even though you had been a renegade for the entire 4 decades of your tenure and that your rebellious independence was exactly the quality that had made you such an asset in the first place!
you learned that the arts, the center of your life, were not the fierce creative forces who spoke truth to power that you believed they were, that they caved hard and fast, went above and beyond enforcing discrimination and doing the government's public health dirty work even when it hurt their commercial interests. you've learned that such vaunted institutions like the Metropolitan Opera, Broadway, the Holocaust Museum, the Spoleto Arts Festival, theater, opera, music have no moral legitimacy.
sure, you've made some new friends and maybe taken on some new causes, but you will never have the shared memories or long term experiences with them that you lost.
everyone you meet you have to wonder "are you a person of character or will you turn on me the minute you are tested?" would your neighbors continue to like you if they ever learn that you didn't buy into "it" or will they hurl bricks through your windows? can you really ever like or trust anyone again?
Renegades, those who follow the beat of their own drum resisting conformity are the canaries in the coalmine of a free society. We are the Early Warning System that something dangerous is approaching and menacing us all. We've always been despised by the true authoritarians, "Damn, dirty hippies!" "Selfish and dangerous!" "Menaces to polite society!" But the movable middle, many of those who we've thought of as our tribe have forgotten the valuable role we play for the cause of freedom in an ostensibly free society. When the renegades, the free thinkers, the "rebels without a cause" like James Dean who were once celebrated are now demonized and ostracized, punished, othered, we are like the canary that keels over in the presence of bad air in a mine, a warning for miners to get out, deadly danger was present, time was limited to save themselves.
We are that EWS. Which is why I believe so much effort is made by authoritarians to control the creative's perceptions with appeals to virtue they know the creative community typically responds to. Believing they are caring, loving people they respond with their big hearts by becoming militant enforcers of virtue as they've been told it is by authorities. When in fact they betray all they believed they stood for. Their compassion turned against them. Meeting the enemy by becoming the enemy. Heartbreaking.
Bingo! The Creatives became the biggest authoritarians. Biggest disappointment of all after I enjoyed that community for as many years as I did, believing they were kindred spirits. When I first started running with a creative crowd I had an older friend from before who asked me nearly a decade ago what I saw in that community. He shared his experience with a similar community in the 1960's, found them to be easily manipulated, could be some of the most rigid authoritarians around, their commitment to freedom very superficial. His words rang in my head many times since 2020. It's still difficult to see and feel the estrangement from once dear friends. But I've always stood in my truth, consequences be damned. This time was no different.
I can't bring myself to totally give up on many of them. I know they are victims of the psychological attacks by our own government, culture and media. But trying to calibrate a message that reignites any ember of freedom that still glows inside them is the challenge. Planting little seeds of doubt now and again all I can muster.
Yes that has been the biggest loss for me and the hardest to get over . I look at every single human now through the lens of did you turn your back on your fellow citizen and let them get fired and de personned over a vaccine ? You expect stupidity lying and game playing with governments. You hope individuals will not want to hurt their fellow citizens, but they did and didn’t give a flying monkeys that it happened. I can’t trust people anymore.
Early in the pandemic mania of Spring, 2020 I came across a story out of Oklahoma about a mayor of a mid-sized city/town there, I don't remember if it was Tulsa or another smaller town, who had ordered lockdowns after Trump's nationwide declaration only to reverse his decision and reopen his town a few weeks later. It seems as though the citizens of that community didn't go along with it, and with great prejudice let their beliefs about lockdowns be known. The story told through the mayor's perspective was that he was subjected to extreme abuse and threats, hounded everywhere he went, shouted at, confronted by local citizens who held nothing back. The mayor retracted his lockdown order saying, "I was just trying to help, all I was doing was trying to help. They didn't have to be so ugly about it, I was surprised at the level of personal hostility directed at me and my family."
I wish I could find that story again, I've searched many times since, lost and obscured by search engine algorithms, no doubt. But the story revealed how We, The People are most responsible for holding our elected officials accountable. And if we don't then we deserve the abuses we're subjected to and the loss of rights we once cherished. We give them our consent to abuse us and take away our rights. And only when we are willing to take our consent back and reclaim our rights are we able to be free people. Neighbors, workmates, friends and family in that Oklahoma city/town understood that truism. And defended their freedom with great prejudice. A lesson for us all.
The feelings of an authoritarian politician being hurt by such impolite objections should be of no consequence. Too bad most of the rest of America didn't react the same way as those townfolk. Yes, our citizens in our own communities are the biggest threat to our freedom if they don't share our same aggressive defense of freedom. Feelings of authoritarians be damned. Authoritarians have no power without the consent of the governed. A society with a government that fears the people more than the people fear the government is a free society.
I've shared this article from Science Alert with others for a long time. It was published in 2019 when Trump was believed to be the Authoritarian regime we needed to be ready to stand up against.
Would You Stand Up to an Authoritarian Regime or Conform? Here's The Science
The people of the Oklahoma town believed that freedom is something that's valuable, worth protecting. So they stood up to authoritarianism. But the (in)action of most communities informs us that most people in the US today, particularly in cities and college towns, don't believe that freedom is valuable, worth protecting.
The most grotesque reflection of this sad reality is found in how many young people and people in cities bullied and disparaged freedom by spelling it "freeDUM" on social media and on posters at protests for lockdowns and mandates. Both Fauci and Biden said "Eff your freedom you selfish murderous bastards! Idiotic dangerous freedom lovers!" Or words to that effect. Looking directly into the cameras and speaking into mics. And their supporters cheered. They don't value and won't protect freedom.
The reason I share the ScienceAlert article here is because it shares the science of what we are up against. And the best strategy available to us to reclaim our birthrights is at the very end of it. We must make the case for freedom to our neighbors, workmates, friends and family who obeyed authorities and ignored, even disparaged us. We are in times akin to 1775. Our constitutional system doesn't exist anymore as we believed it did. And a great many of our neighbors, workmates, friends and family prefer the rule of an authoritarian "expert" class, an elite that promises to protect us over risky freedom. And we must reacquaint them with their birthright, handed down by God, their inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The nation's founders helped rally a revolution like no other in world history by handing out pamphlets like Thomas Paine's "Common Sense" and rousing speeches about the call to freedom in pubs. We must do the same. For ourselves and our posterity.
‘The Mob’ was one of the most disturbing elements of the last few years for me. We’ve all grown up with the stories of the raging, pitch fork wielding mob coming to banish or destroy. It’s certainly unsettling to see it in action and to be the outsider that rage is directed at.
Some friends were in the front row of the mob. It’s hard to let that image go and forgive.
so true. why would anyone have ever trusted the government? even the framers of the government warned you against trusting them and did their best to limit their power going forward because they knew they couldn't be trusted!
no, the heartbreaking part was seeing how your "friends" and "relatives" behaved, realizing that they would have all volunteered to load jews onto boxcars for brownie points back in the day, learning that the people you would have trusted with your life probably couldn't be trusted with your cat, that you had friends of 30, 40 years duration who you will probably never speak to again, that the job you loved with a passion (and rearranged your entire life so you could do it until you dropped dead) really assumed that you would just quietly comply even though you had been a renegade for the entire 4 decades of your tenure and that your rebellious independence was exactly the quality that had made you such an asset in the first place!
you learned that the arts, the center of your life, were not the fierce creative forces who spoke truth to power that you believed they were, that they caved hard and fast, went above and beyond enforcing discrimination and doing the government's public health dirty work even when it hurt their commercial interests. you've learned that such vaunted institutions like the Metropolitan Opera, Broadway, the Holocaust Museum, the Spoleto Arts Festival, theater, opera, music have no moral legitimacy.
sure, you've made some new friends and maybe taken on some new causes, but you will never have the shared memories or long term experiences with them that you lost.
everyone you meet you have to wonder "are you a person of character or will you turn on me the minute you are tested?" would your neighbors continue to like you if they ever learn that you didn't buy into "it" or will they hurl bricks through your windows? can you really ever like or trust anyone again?
Renegades, those who follow the beat of their own drum resisting conformity are the canaries in the coalmine of a free society. We are the Early Warning System that something dangerous is approaching and menacing us all. We've always been despised by the true authoritarians, "Damn, dirty hippies!" "Selfish and dangerous!" "Menaces to polite society!" But the movable middle, many of those who we've thought of as our tribe have forgotten the valuable role we play for the cause of freedom in an ostensibly free society. When the renegades, the free thinkers, the "rebels without a cause" like James Dean who were once celebrated are now demonized and ostracized, punished, othered, we are like the canary that keels over in the presence of bad air in a mine, a warning for miners to get out, deadly danger was present, time was limited to save themselves.
We are that EWS. Which is why I believe so much effort is made by authoritarians to control the creative's perceptions with appeals to virtue they know the creative community typically responds to. Believing they are caring, loving people they respond with their big hearts by becoming militant enforcers of virtue as they've been told it is by authorities. When in fact they betray all they believed they stood for. Their compassion turned against them. Meeting the enemy by becoming the enemy. Heartbreaking.
Bingo! The Creatives became the biggest authoritarians. Biggest disappointment of all after I enjoyed that community for as many years as I did, believing they were kindred spirits. When I first started running with a creative crowd I had an older friend from before who asked me nearly a decade ago what I saw in that community. He shared his experience with a similar community in the 1960's, found them to be easily manipulated, could be some of the most rigid authoritarians around, their commitment to freedom very superficial. His words rang in my head many times since 2020. It's still difficult to see and feel the estrangement from once dear friends. But I've always stood in my truth, consequences be damned. This time was no different.
I can't bring myself to totally give up on many of them. I know they are victims of the psychological attacks by our own government, culture and media. But trying to calibrate a message that reignites any ember of freedom that still glows inside them is the challenge. Planting little seeds of doubt now and again all I can muster.
Yes that has been the biggest loss for me and the hardest to get over . I look at every single human now through the lens of did you turn your back on your fellow citizen and let them get fired and de personned over a vaccine ? You expect stupidity lying and game playing with governments. You hope individuals will not want to hurt their fellow citizens, but they did and didn’t give a flying monkeys that it happened. I can’t trust people anymore.
Early in the pandemic mania of Spring, 2020 I came across a story out of Oklahoma about a mayor of a mid-sized city/town there, I don't remember if it was Tulsa or another smaller town, who had ordered lockdowns after Trump's nationwide declaration only to reverse his decision and reopen his town a few weeks later. It seems as though the citizens of that community didn't go along with it, and with great prejudice let their beliefs about lockdowns be known. The story told through the mayor's perspective was that he was subjected to extreme abuse and threats, hounded everywhere he went, shouted at, confronted by local citizens who held nothing back. The mayor retracted his lockdown order saying, "I was just trying to help, all I was doing was trying to help. They didn't have to be so ugly about it, I was surprised at the level of personal hostility directed at me and my family."
I wish I could find that story again, I've searched many times since, lost and obscured by search engine algorithms, no doubt. But the story revealed how We, The People are most responsible for holding our elected officials accountable. And if we don't then we deserve the abuses we're subjected to and the loss of rights we once cherished. We give them our consent to abuse us and take away our rights. And only when we are willing to take our consent back and reclaim our rights are we able to be free people. Neighbors, workmates, friends and family in that Oklahoma city/town understood that truism. And defended their freedom with great prejudice. A lesson for us all.
The feelings of an authoritarian politician being hurt by such impolite objections should be of no consequence. Too bad most of the rest of America didn't react the same way as those townfolk. Yes, our citizens in our own communities are the biggest threat to our freedom if they don't share our same aggressive defense of freedom. Feelings of authoritarians be damned. Authoritarians have no power without the consent of the governed. A society with a government that fears the people more than the people fear the government is a free society.
I've shared this article from Science Alert with others for a long time. It was published in 2019 when Trump was believed to be the Authoritarian regime we needed to be ready to stand up against.
Would You Stand Up to an Authoritarian Regime or Conform? Here's The Science
ScienceAlert, October 1, 2019
https://www.sciencealert.com/would-you-stand-up-to-an-authoritarian-regime-or-conform-here-s-the-science
or the Archive page since the original above has been going up and down lately:
https://web.archive.org/web/20220208062012/https://www.sciencealert.com/would-you-stand-up-to-an-authoritarian-regime-or-conform-here-s-the-science
The people of the Oklahoma town believed that freedom is something that's valuable, worth protecting. So they stood up to authoritarianism. But the (in)action of most communities informs us that most people in the US today, particularly in cities and college towns, don't believe that freedom is valuable, worth protecting.
The most grotesque reflection of this sad reality is found in how many young people and people in cities bullied and disparaged freedom by spelling it "freeDUM" on social media and on posters at protests for lockdowns and mandates. Both Fauci and Biden said "Eff your freedom you selfish murderous bastards! Idiotic dangerous freedom lovers!" Or words to that effect. Looking directly into the cameras and speaking into mics. And their supporters cheered. They don't value and won't protect freedom.
The reason I share the ScienceAlert article here is because it shares the science of what we are up against. And the best strategy available to us to reclaim our birthrights is at the very end of it. We must make the case for freedom to our neighbors, workmates, friends and family who obeyed authorities and ignored, even disparaged us. We are in times akin to 1775. Our constitutional system doesn't exist anymore as we believed it did. And a great many of our neighbors, workmates, friends and family prefer the rule of an authoritarian "expert" class, an elite that promises to protect us over risky freedom. And we must reacquaint them with their birthright, handed down by God, their inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The nation's founders helped rally a revolution like no other in world history by handing out pamphlets like Thomas Paine's "Common Sense" and rousing speeches about the call to freedom in pubs. We must do the same. For ourselves and our posterity.
‘The Mob’ was one of the most disturbing elements of the last few years for me. We’ve all grown up with the stories of the raging, pitch fork wielding mob coming to banish or destroy. It’s certainly unsettling to see it in action and to be the outsider that rage is directed at.
Some friends were in the front row of the mob. It’s hard to let that image go and forgive.
absolutely 100%