Free State Observer

Last July, I blogged about moving into my new house, the first house I’ve ever owned. Also, the first place in the country I’ve ever lived. Since then, I’ve learned all sorts of new lessons, sometimes the comically hard way. I’ve lost some weight and gained some muscle. Haven’t had much time for blogging, since I’m generally either a) working b) mowing my ginormous lawn c) commuting (which now sucks up 1.5 hours a day) d) hauling my own garbage to the town dump or, most recently, e) battling snow.

Is it all worth it? Absolutely.

Here’s a smorgasbord of anecdotes from the past 6 months:

– My house has mice. Lots of them, judging by the scampering sounds often coming from the walls around me. My cats have spent their entire lives indoors, but hunting mice is clearly instinctual. What to do with them after *catching* them is more of a grey area. My cats don’t want to kill the mice so much as bat them, smash them, jump up and down on them, and prance around proudly with mouse limbs dangling out of their mouths. A couple of times, I’ve become so sympathetic to the living creature that has become a toy that I pick it up and take it outside. I’ve had to retrieve several corpses from the living room floor and provide burial services (i.e. open the door and fling them outside). One poor little guy was disemboweled and bleeding all over the place, but still alive. I bawled my head off, took him outside, and hoped for his sake he had a few moments to make his peace with the Mouse Lord before dying, hopefully quickly. Ah, nature red in tooth and claw, and dripping rodent blood on my hardwood floor…

– My house has a variety of heat sources, none of which I’m fully in control of. It has skylights and a greenhouse-style glass wall in the living room, which is great for natural light but turns the place into a sauna in the summertime. Also, I cleverly located my computer monitor in such a way that it’s rendered useless by glare for a certain period of time each day. I do, however, have more plants than in all the rest of my life put together, and they’re all doing quite well. It’s like a tiny tropical paradise inside while, outside, it’s currently below freezing and snowing.

– The primary heat source is an enormous, scary-looking furnace thing in the basement. I suddenly can relate to the kid in “Home Alone” and his desire to avoid going into the basement. At first, I couldn’t figure out how to turn the thing on. My dad came to visit and he couldn’t figure it out either. Some combination of pushing buttons and fiddling with the thermostat eventually worked, and everything was great, until the day it mysteriously stopped working. After several days of increasing chilliness, I opened an account with a local fuel service. I told the extremely nice lady on the phone that I was completely clueless as to the nature of my heating device; fortunately, she took it in stride. When she asked how much fuel was left in the tank, I said I had no idea… but a sneaking suspicion popped into my head: there was that gauge-looking thing on the top of the fuel tank. I never really looked at it, trying to avoid direct eye contact with the rusty behemoth in the basement. Sucking it up, I finally took a good look at it, and oh, hey, it was empty! Guess that explained why my feet were turning blue. The good news was, it was an easy problem to fix (put fuel in tank). The bad news was, I had absolutely no idea how much liquid heating fuel costs. Oh my fucking god.

– The house came with a riding mower. I was so proud of myself for figuring out how to drive it (I have yet to master a manual transmission car), and got about 10 minutes of mowing done before the thing died and refused to start up again. It then sat on my lawn for the rest of the summer as a sort of ornament. It wasn’t until late October I paid someone to come take a look at it and found out, hey, lawn tractors need fuel too! What’s with everything in the country needing fuel?? It actually needed some other fixing, too, though. Since the grass growing season was essentially over anyway, I got it repaired just in time to roll it back into the shed until next spring.

– Since the lawn tractor was no help at all, I went out and bought an electric mower. It worked well, but didn’t run for as long as the manufacturer’s writeup claimed it would on a battery charge. So I basically had to mow my lawn every single day, for as long as the battery would hold out, then plug it back in until the next day. The lawn became my own personal Boulder of Sisyphus. Every day I would mow, and every day there would be more grass and weeds. I dubbed an entire section of lawn “the back 40″ and decided it really didn’t need mowing after all; I would leave it as a small nature preserve. I managed to finally finish the portion of lawn that I felt really needed to be mowed, for aesthetic reasons, by the end of summer.

– One day, there was a swarm of ladybugs in the upstairs bathroom. I don’t know where they came from, how they got in, but months later, I’m still finding random ladybugs around the house.

– Thoughts of snow were never far from my mind, even in the heat of summer. About a month ago, it suddenly occurred to me that, because my driveway opens directly onto a highway (well, what passes for a highway in New Hampshire; it’s 2-lane blacktop), the highway snow plows were going to wall me off after every storm. So I would either need to make arrangements to have someone deal with that for me, or stay home during every snowstorm, because if I were out when a storm started, I’d be unable to get back to my own house. I’m still working on how exactly I’m going to communicate this fact to my employer.

– The first real snowfall of the season occurred last weekend. Although I was working 6-7 days a week, I made an executive decision and tore myself away from the computer long enough to drive to Lowe’s (what in the name of all that is holy did homeowners do before Lowe’s was invented?) to buy a snowblower. Actually, I bought the snowblower online, then went to Lowe’s to pick it up. And no, I had never laid eyes on, let alone handled, a snowblower before. I bought a big one. It’s shiny and red, and its web description sounded like it can blow lots of snow. When I asked the nice man in the store if he could help me load it into the back of my Subaru, there was surprisingly little hesitation when he said “No!” Hmmmm. Apparently, snowblowers are larger than I had imagined. Fortunately, Lowe’s rents trucks! I’ve driven a truck before. Twice, in fact!! Never a flatbed with a cage, though. With a very big, shiny, red snowblower rolling back and forth and repeatedly smashing into the back of the cab because I scoffed at the nice man’s suggestion of tying the snowblower down. Also, my timing was impeccable: the snow started while I was driving the truck. I found that the possibility of imminent death via driving accident/braining by snowblower added an air of real excitement to the day! I was having a great time!! I found some random radio station playing classic 70’s and 80’s heavy metal, and roared across the New Hampshire countryside, screaming like a banshee, in the driving snow, with my snowblower trying its darnedest to join me in the truck cab and enter the back of my skull. Woohoo!!!!!

– Four days ago, we got the first real snowstorm of the season; my town supposedly got 8.5 inches. I had planned ahead, and stopped at Lowe’s (a different one this time; fortunately, every New Hampshire city has a Lowes) the night before and bought a gas can. I had never actually handled a gas can before, or attempted to put gas into one. I hope no one at the Shell station flung a match on the ground after my first attempt at filling said gas can, what with all the splashing around of highly combustible fluid. The day of the storm, I didn’t even bother trying to drive to work, I just worked from home, nonstop, from dawn to midnightish. So there wasn’t a lot of wiggle room in there to try out the snowblower.

– Three days ago, I got up at dawn (well, I do that anyway, but it sounds more dramatic to say “got up at dawn”), hoping to get my driveway cleared before my first conference call of the day. I knew that the gasoline I had managed to get into the gas can (mostly) needed to go into the snowblower somehow. And there was a place for a key, and a string to pull, and an electric starter option. The nice man at Lowe’s had said a LOT of other stuff about “priming”, “augurs”, “choke”, “shear pins”, etc., but about the only thing I retained was that I should under no circumstances stick my hand into the snow chute; I should use the plastic stick thingie to clear clogs. So I read the user manual over my morning coffee. Then I went outside and circled the snowblower warily, sort of letting it know who’s boss without actually engaging in direct contact with it. Then I went inside for more coffee. After a hopeful but pathetic attempt to avoid the necessity of actually using the snowblower at all by just smashing down almost a foot of fluffy snow with my car by trying to drive through it to the road (I did make it a good three feet before getting stuck!), I eventually did succeed in starting my snow blower (after once again splashing quite a bit of gasoline around). I was so pleased with myself, I really wanted to go inside and rest for a while, but the manual said I should not leave my snowblower unattended with the engine running. So there was nothing left to do but actually start plowing, which turned out to not be all that bad. I wore my gunowner’s hearing protection, pictured myself in the flannel shirt I do not own, and manfully plowed my quarter-mile driveway. It took three freakin’ HOURS (two in the morning, and one more on my lunch break), and my palms were bruised and my nails broke and my arms still ache three days later, but dag nabbit, I did it!! I took a little victory lap in my car to nowhere in particular, just because I could.

During the break between hours 2 and 3 of snowblowing, I got a friendly call from PSNH (the New Hampshire gas and electric provider) informing me that my bill (which I had already noticed was late) had been returned to them by the post office, marked “mailbox down”. It wasn’t until I plowed all the way up to the highway that I discovered that the road plows had buried my mailbox in an ice wall and knocked it askew. My next door neighbor was even worse off; you could barely even see his mailbox anymore. I had neither the time nor the upper body strength left to even start to deal with that, so I just left it until the weekend.

Yesterday I trudged up my driveway, heavily bundled against a bitter-cold, windy day, with a snow shovel in my hand, on a mailbox rescue mission. I didn’t have the heart to fire up the snowblower again and figured I’d do it the old-fashioned way. I scrambled up the ice wall created by the highway plows and started digging around my mailbox. Parts of the ice wall could support my weight; the parts that couldn’t left me knee-deep in snow and in serious dangerous of leaving my boot behind when I managed to retrieve my foot. This floundering, scrabbling and sinking went on for some time, until I finally managed to unbury my mailbox enough to discover that its post wasn’t actually broken, just tipped over. The post was embedded in a block of cement. Now maybe if I hadn’t exhausted my arms two days previously, and/or could get any sort of traction on the ice wall, I could have managed to move my mailbox, but as it was, I might as well have been attempting to drag my car. I managed to maneuver and slide it in such a way that it was sort of hanging at the edge of the ice wall, horizontally, and decided that that would just have to be good enough for the mailman. It was at this moment that a crusty old New Hampshire gentleman in an enormous pickup truck with a plow on the front pulled off the highway, rolled down his window, and gallantly asked “Need some help?” Throwing self-respect to the wind, I practically squealed “Yes, please!!!” Sixty seconds later, the mailman drove up and pulled over, directly in front of my knight in shining armor (who *did* have a flannel shirt, by the way). He handed me my mail, and I asked about this business of apparently needing to break down the ice wall created by the highway plow in order to receive mail service. He seemed quite apologetic but said yes. But he also said that he generally holds onto people’s mail after storms, figuring they need some time to dig out, and just brings it back the next day. It must have been a substitute who returned my PSNH bill the other day. So, all’s well that ends well! I got my mail, a total stranger plowed away the ice wall in front of my mailbox, and I went to Starbucks for a mocha.

And today, it started snowing again. The adventure continues…

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Primum non nocere is a Latin phrase that means “First, do no harm.” The phrase is sometimes recorded as primum nil nocere.

Nonmaleficence, which derives from the maxim, is one of the principal precepts that all medical students are taught in medical school and is a fundamental principle for emergency medical services around the world. Another way to state it is that “given an existing problem, it may be better to do nothing than to do something that risks causing more harm than good.” It reminds the physician and other health care providers that they must consider the possible harm that any intervention might do. It is invoked when debating the use of an intervention that carries an obvious risk of harm but a less certain chance of benefit. Since at least 1860, the phrase has been for physicians a hallowed expression of hope, intention, humility, and recognition that human acts with good intentions may have unwanted consequences. A closely related phrase is “Sometimes the cure is worse than the ill.” source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primum_non_nocere

A common statement made when liberty activists are arguing with one another about the best way to proceed is “At least we’re/they’re/he’s doing something.” I don’t know where this idea came from, but it sure makes me want to smack people upside the head sometimes, in hopes that some common sense will be jarred loose from whichever internal part of their brain it’s currently trapped. There are plenty of life scenarios where doing something is not necessarily better than doing nothing. If you’re overweight and out-of-shape, going out and running five miles is not better than staying on the couch, if those five miles trigger a heart attack in your shocked and unprepared body. If you’re in Vegas with your life savings in cash in your wallet, betting it all at the blackjack table isn’t necessarily safe, wise or better than doing nothing with it.

Now granted, we’re all operating with unknowns. Inside-the-system activists (which I will abbreviate as ITS) have never actually succeeded in getting someone like Ron Paul elected to the Presidency (or a governorship… or a Senate seat… or even a Congressional district outside of Bumfuck, TX). If something miraculous happened and this occurred tomorrow, there would undoubtedly be unexpected hurdles and side effects prior to achieving the presumed goal of making our society freer (like, oh, say, the President still has to deal with CONGRESS). Outside-the-system activists (which I will abbreviate as OTS) have never (talking about the last 50 years in the U.S. here, not the whole history of history) actually succeeded in making a state or a town free of the coercive grasp of government. I could write a whole science fiction novella about the possible ramifications of the abrupt removal of coercive government from a community unprepared and ill-equipped to handle that, but I’ll save myself some time and just refer you back to the news coverage of the aftermath of Katrina, where the jackals of human society lost no time feeding off their slower and weaker neighbors.

What’s my point? We’re all operating with imperfect information, and no one truly knows the quickest, best path to creating a free society. (Freeing yourself is a different subject which numerous philosophers, political thinkers and spiritual leaders have addressed elsewhere; for starters, I refer you to the excellent How I Found Freedom In An Unfree World by the late, great Harry Browne ). But to blindly argue that all strategies are equally valid, and doing something is always better than doing nothing, is to willfully turn off the analytical, pattern-recognizing part of your brain that can project likely outcomes from actions not yet taken.

Ben Franklin advised: Do not squander time for that is the stuff life is made of. I see people in both the ITS and OTS groups running around like chickens with their heads cut off, breathlessly doing something and acting self-righteous about it. If you’ve thought about what you’re doing, believe you know what the consequences will be, and you like those consequences, then more power to you. If you’re not sure, or haven’t even begun to think about it, your brain is your friend and wants you to use it.

Another thing: back seat drivers. We all hate them. However, to argue that if someone doesn’t live in New Hampshire, and/or is not engaged in the specific type of activism in which I am engaged, they cannot possibly have anything of value to say to me about what is going on here… I mean, seriously? Are we that full of ourselves? The beauty and power of media (the written word, and more recently, audio and video) is that it enables us to communicate asynchronously with people in other times and places, and to, God forbid, learn from someone else’s insights or wisdom. Why not keep an open mind when advice or critiques are offered?

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Observers of the Free State Project are undoubtedly aware that civil disobedience has been growing in popularity as a method of promoting limited/no government in New Hampshire. I have been struggling with this concept for, well, crap, years now. It’s been just over three years since I expressed some befuddlement over why someone would choose to get arrested. All of a sudden, in a paranoid and hungover blast of clarity, I think I get it.

The goal of civil disobedience is communication.

Allow me to continue to milk the Matrix-is-a-metaphor-for-the-21st-century cow. We are born slaves. Within moments of birth, we are taken away from our mother’s (hopefully) loving arms and isolated in a glass box, tended (hopefully) by frazzled, overworked strangers. If we’re male, the end of our penis might be cut off… for our own “health”, or because that’s what God wants. Within weeks, we’re probably carried by our parents to a temple of some sort where we are lifted into the air in front of family and friends and a public apology is made for our very existence. Our innate evilness and unworthiness is proclaimed. Some sort of voodoo priest in ceremonial garb then sprinkles magic water on us, says an incantation, and suddenly we’re not evil anymore.

At this point, if we had the mental maturity to comprehend what was going on around us, we might very well be considering the possibility that the events of our first few weeks of life don’t bode particularly well for the years ahead… which are all about control.

First, you must learn to control your body. You may only release waste in authorized areas. You may only cry and scream in designated areas. You must lie down and try to sleep at specified times.

Next, you learn to not notice that your mind is being controlled. You must report to location X at exactly clock-time Y. You must think about the multiplication table. Or George Washington. Or sharing your toy. You may only speak to your friends at designated times. You may not laugh, cry, shout, or go to sleep, outside of designated places and times. You must use your “indoor voice”. You must learn to walk single-file. You must follow instructions, whatever they may be. If you don’t, you will be beaten and/or drugged.

Childhood prepares you for adulthood, at which point you are expected to become a productive slave. (In true Orwellian fashion, the State will refer to you as a “consumer” rather than a “producer”.) Find a niche within the global industrial complex, perform some sort of service which may or may not meet any actual human need, and give over half of your pay to the State. Have children, and plug them promptly into the Matrix… or they will be removed from your care. When they reach physical maturity, the State may request that one or more of them travel to a distant area and engage in mortal combat with some people, for some reason. You are to consider this a mark of great pride. Comply, always using your “indoor voice” and walking in single file, or be imprisoned.

As in the Matrix, the State has Agents. Treat them very gingerly. So much as present the appearance of a physical threat to one of them, and you will be swiftly tasered or shot.

If, for whatever reason, a red pill has made its way down your throat, you may choose to chip away at various facets of the Matrix by, for example, not putting your children in public school; not drugging your children… or yourself; not buying into the Judgmental-Old-Guy-in-the-Sky form of control. I don’t mean to denigrate any of these activities; I applaud them. But all of these things don’t change the fundamental fact that you’re a SLAVE.

You may choose to engage in electoral politics, running for office or helping others to do so. Writing bills, or fighting bills. The State loves this strategy. You expend your limited time, income and energy in an utterly futile attempt to replace a few low-level bureaucrats with slightly less restrictive individuals. Ultimately, this changes nothing. You, and everyone you know, remain a SLAVE. (And please don’t forget to use your “indoor voice” in the Legislative Office Building.)

There is only one way to kill the Matrix: unplug enough of the people who feed it. Enable them to see the world for what it is, rather than for what they have been led to believe it is. Ironically, no one can be forced to unplug. All sorts of evidence may be laid in front of someone’s eyes, but if they choose not to see it or to grasp its implications, there’s nothing you can do about it. (Exhibit A: Zeitgeist, the Movie ) All you can do is get your pirate signal out there, over and over, and hope that enough people will hear it, and will listen.

Which brings me back (finally!) to civil disobedience. I’ve blogged here before that it doesn’t seem like a good time to me to hang out in jail; sitting in court, paying fines, and dealing with paperwork doesn’t sound all that great, either. I’ve been baffled by those of my friends who intentionally tweak the noses of Agents in various ways to willfully get themselves arrested. CD is self-destructive, sacrificing a bit of your own precious life for the benefit of others. That’s a charitable interpretation; a less charitable one is that some people derive adolescent pleasure out of sticking it to “the Man”, getting a friend to film it, and hoping they look cool when it’s posted on YouTube. And some people simply let their authority issues overwhelm their good sense, needlessly getting themselves into trouble. (My mother used to refer to this as “cutting off your nose to spite your face”.) The monk who set himself on fire to protest the Vietnamese government’s treatment of Buddhists is one of the world’s most famous civil disobeyers; his image has become iconic. A guy who took a picture of the incident won a Pulitzer. But the monk himself is, you know… dead now.

So why do it? A well-executed act of civil disobedience is a pirate broadcast. It sends a message out into the Matrix, which some will notice, and a smaller number will hear. It shines a light on the Matrix itself, enabling those ensnared within it to observe its clinging invisible mesh. It reminds the viewer, if only for a moment, that something as trivial as failing to use your “indoor voice” can result in ludicrously excessive punishment. Ideally, it makes the viewer wonder what life might be like outside of the Matrix.

So where does all this leave me, your faithful first-person-narrative confessional-tone blogger? I swallowed the Red Pill a year and a half ago, and have spent the time since shell-shocked and sulking in a corner of the Nebuchadnezzar, eating slop that may or may not taste like Cream of Wheat, glaring at those still trapped in the Matrix and blaming them for their own predicament. Productive….. not!

I’m not about to rush out and battle an Agent; I am no Trinity. Call me craven, but I fully intend to run (pay, bow, kneel, suck, whatever it takes) to avoid getting tased or caged. But I also intend to find a way to boost the pirate signal, to make myself useful and, hopefully, free the minds of at least a few more people.

Wake up.

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tribe - noun any aggregate of people united by ties of descent from a common ancestor, community of customs and traditions, adherence to the same leaders, etc.

They came from the Seacoast (on the eastern border), Salem (on the southern border), and Winchester (on the western border). They came from the city (Manchester) and the country (Barnstead, Grafton). They came from all over New Hampshire, by way of states all over the U.S. (Maine, Washington, California, South Carolina, Kansas, Georgia). They came to help me move into my new home.

None of my blood relatives came to help me (in fact, none of them even did me the courtesy of acknowledging that I’d invited them to do so). None of my coworkers, some of whom I respect and enjoy, and some of whom live in the same town as me and told me they’d help me, actually showed up to do so. But every single New Hampshire Porcupine, to a person, who told me they’d come to help me, kept their word and did so. Several brought their children, and put them to work as well. Kids hauled my garbage, searched my house to find where my shell-shocked cats were hiding, and planted a shrub in my garden as a housewarming gift. Every single one of these people could have found a more enjoyable way to spend a beautiful warm Saturday (it was even the birthday of two of the kids (twins)).

These people are my tribe. I have a tribe! One and only one thing unites us, but that one thing is enough: the realization that we don’t need government. That, in fact, government usually/always (opinions differ on this point) does more harm than good. The government certainly didn’t help me move. It didn’t carry any furniture down my stairs. It didn’t come over, shake my hand, hand me a business card, and say “I live down the street. If you ever need anything, call me.” It didn’t rent me a truck (a private business did that). It didn’t provide me a modern-day place to “hunt and gather” enough “bananas” with which to buy a house (four entrepreneurs who founded and run my company did that). All it did was leave a nasty note on my car for I’m not sure what reason (parking too long on a public street by the U-Haul office?) warning me that if I didn’t move it soon, I’d get towed.

The actual move took very little time: about 45 minutes on the loading end, 30 minutes on the unloading end. The rest of the afternoon was spent eating, drinking, joking, gossiping and debating political philosophy. And when it comes right down to it, that’s what life is all about. There are certain timeless and universal truths. Babies are cute. Cats do funny things. Charred meat and beer taste good. People fall in, and out, of love. And we hairless apes still, after, what, 6 million years?, are arguing about how best to live together in relative peace without stealing each other’s bananas. And that’s OK! So maybe the occasional four-letter word was shouted (in front of the children, no less!). Each of us respects the others’ right to keep the bananas they’ve picked themselves.

For the first time in a long time, I have a sense of hope. I suddenly understand on a different level that it’s not about improving the government, or finding a way to coopt it, or take it over, or defeat it. It’s about learning to work with it, or around it, or flat-out IGNORING it. And in the meantime, we’re teaching our children, and earning our livings, and building our homes, and living our lives. Good, decent lives. With gossip. And beer.

Excuse me for quoting a politician, but it really is a good line: Government is not a solution to our problem, government is the problem. If you, like us, understand that… and also understand that there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch (aka TANSTAAFL), that you need to find an honest way to earn a living and put a roof over your head and bananas in your belly… then I invite you to join us here in New Hampshire. (But please, don’t come if you haven’t grasped both halves of that last sentence; we have ways of dealing with those types…)

Join the Free State Project now.

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Three years ago today, I blogged about how I was leaving the Libertarian Party and becoming politically independent. To paraphrase the Dead, what a long strange trip it’s been since then.

Today, I’m declaring a different kind of independence, and one that I believe is more significant than a political party affiliation or lack thereof. I spent the day moving some of my crap into my new home, the first house I have ever owned. Owning my own home has extreme emotional, almost mythical, significance for me. While most little girls were playing with baby dolls and dreaming of their wedding day, I was playing with my extensive collection of toy horses and dreaming of owning my own ranch. Laura Ingalls was my imaginary friend (really). OK, maybe there was some less wholesome play with my Ken doll and a bevy of blond plastic vixens, but let’s stay on topic, shall we?

Not only am I moving into a new house, I’m moving into a completely new lifestyle. I spent my childhood living in a succession of utterly stereotypical 3-BR suburban ranch houses, and my adulthood in a succession of apartments, shared flats, and shared houses, all in cities. Now, I live on a “mail carrier rural route”! I have my own sources of water and heat, and enough land and vegetation to raise my own produce, dairy, and even brew my own maple syrple if I want. Of course, I’m not focused on any of that right now; I’m focused on when is the Internet getting turned on (40 hours, not that I’m counting or anything). I may be a country geekgrrl now, but they’ll take my high speed phat pipe from my cold, dead hands!!!

I’ve never been responsible for care and upkeep of my own place of residence before. If something broke, Daddy fixed it. Or the University fixed it. Or the landlord fixed it. Or the property management company fixed it. Now, if something breaks, *I* fix it, or go without. Considering I had trouble figuring out how to open a f@@@ing bird feeder earlier today, I’m thinking I have a LOT to learn. I’d better stop drinking; I need every remaining brain cell.

I’m not so deluded as to think I’m truly independent and self-sufficient. I can’t produce all my own food, and have no interest in even trying; it’s far more efficient (and less strenuous) for me to stare at a computer monitor all day and then pay somebody else to produce my food. And while I know I can get by without electricity, I have no intention of living that lifestyle unless things get really Bibliddy and apocalyptic. As for defending myself by actually putting a bullet into another human being, I honestly don’t know if I’ve got it in me, and hope to never need to find out.

So now, with a sore back and aching muscles I didn’t know I had (nothing like wrangling a 55-lb dehumidifier down the basement stairs in 70% humidity; good times), I declare my independence…

– from the municipal water system
– from the electrical grid for heating purposes (have to work on removing that prepositional clause)
– from the municipal waste hauling system
– from any lingering false sense of security provided by the close proximity of city cops
– from spoiled obliviousness of the basic workings of common household appliances
– from scraping ice off the car windows at oh-dark-thirty AM (yessssssssss)
– from carrying 30-lb bags of kitty litter up two flights of stairs
– from air conditioning and electric dishwashers

Just kidding on that last one. Homegirl NEEDS A/C and a dishwasher.

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I think I owe an apology to everyone I’ve ever pulled a high-and-mighty on for working for the government, or a government contractor, or a less-than-savory private organization. I’ve spent much of the last three days working for a nonprofit thinktank. A thinktank that provides services to the Department of Defense, and Department of Homeland Security. I’ve leapt through various mental hoops, coming up with creative ways to justify this. *I’m* not killing anybody. *I’m* not building things that will kill anybody. I’m just helping people who, more than likely, tell the government how to more efficiently kill somebody. That’s not so bad, right? It’s like peeling potatoes in a Nazi kitchen. Potatoes don’t hurt anybody! And everybody’s got to eat. Right? Ummm… Anyway, at least it’s only going to be two weeks worth of Nazi potato peeling.

I’m reminded of a job I had, back in my mid-20’s, working graveyard shift one week for the IRS in a tax check processing center. Politics aside, it was probably the worst job I ever had. I was half psychotic by the end of the week. Wrote a song about it. Wanna hear it? Here it is.

****
Punch it in, early morning, coffee crash low
Slam another cup and you’re ready to go
Got your smile frozen on
And a gleam in your eye
Multinaticorporate cutie-pie
Information matron on the 20th floor
21st century whore.

Sit right down, turn the terminal on,
And become a good, dutiful automaton.
Keep your eyes on the screen
And your hands on the keys
‘Til your head starts to pound
And you’re stiff in the knees
Not even sure what you’re doing it for
21st century whore.

Milling and shuffling with the rest of the herd
Every day get a little more inured
Run and hide in a stall
Ten minutes of relief
You’re an overtrained, underpaid slab o’ beef
Time’s almost up, then it’s back for more
21st century whore.

It makes perfect sense
Submission to co-option is the best defense
Cut out the middleman, sell yourself for more!

[guitar wailing here]

Struttin’ your stuff, lookin’ cool and mean
In a suit of silk and gabardine
You’ve got all the moves
You’re smokin’ now
Climbing through the ranks to be number one cow
Shake it for me, baby, sexy corporate boor
21st century whore.

21st century,
Living’ lap o’ luxury,
Upwardly mobile,
travellin’ in style….

Whore.

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I used to think that it didn’t get any better than springtime in the San Francisco Bay Area; given a choice, why would anyone live anywhere else? Having broadened my horizons since then, I realize that springtime is beautiful in lots of places, including southern New Hampshire. The color green is practically a visual assault, and there are so many baby birds and fuzzy woodland creatures scampering around, it looks like a Disney movie. Unfortunately, the State of New Hampshire seems to have decided to stop cleaning up roadkill as a way to lower expenses, so the highways have become a grizzly scene of blood-splattered carnage. Scamper FASTER, fuzzy woodland creatures!!

Last night my cousin treated me to a baseball game. Now, this is what “baseball game” means to me, in terms of going to see the A’s at the Oakland Coliseum: either you take BART (public commuter rail), sitting elbow to elbow with someone who may or may not be insane, a gangster, or come from another country where standards of personal hygiene and deodorant application vary from one’s hopes and expectations, then walk 20 minutes over a pedestrian bridge, over one of the most congested highways in the country, breathing an odiferous medley of carcinogenic fragrances, while repeatedly harangued by scalpers trying to either buy or sell tickets, depending on your proximity to the stadium. OR, you drive on the aforementioned congested highway, through one of the most dangerous neighborhoods of a dangerous city, and pay $15 (no bills larger than $20 accepted) to park. If, like my cousin, you’re bringing your wife, three kids and one weird cousin, you then spend half a month’s rent/mortgage on tickets and food. Your view is blocked by several drunk and belligerent fellows who shout obscenities non-stop for 3 hours in front of your 4-year-old. Security guards search your wife’s duffel bag of baby supplies, and don’t you dare try to save money by bringing in your own beverages.

Now, this is what a baseball game is like in Nashua, New Hampshire, twice rated “Best Place to Live in America” by Money magazine. You cruise into the parking lot of Holman Stadium with no traffic jams to speak of. You find a parking spot easily… and it’s FREE (I’m still feeling vaguely guilty about that, as if I somehow snuck in the service driveway and avoided the fee collectors). You pay a hefty $5 to get in, and that’s not a bleacher seat, that’s reserved. The sun is shining, the birds are singing, it’s an idyllic 74 degrees, there are multiple concession stands, none of which has a line. No one pats you down or searches your bags. There were a couple of city cops “patrolling” the premises, but the only actual work I saw either of them do through the entire course of the game was to help a guy find the bathroom. Children are everywhere; if there’s one thing Granite Staters know how to do, it’s BREED. Many of the children seem unsupervised and run around in little shrieking packs. No one seems concerned that they’ll be snatched off the street. The local mascot runs around acting silly and high-fiving people, while the local cheer leader? (not sure what the correct term is) leads the crowd in a series of inane but oddly amusing games such as spin around in a circle ten times and then try to run across the field (result: half the participants fell on their faces); play air guitar; walk around the field blind-folded trying to locate a $10 bill. The highlight was “Tag the Mascot”, where a scrum of at least 200 children chased the mascot across the outfield like some shrieking horde of miniature Huns. The national anthem was sung by kids from the local Catholic school. It was all so disgustingly wholesome and cute, I felt like the Grinch in Whoville.

There’s always been an aura of jingoism around professional baseball games, and I see it’s only gotten worse. There’s still the obligatory standing and saluting the Stars and Stripes while the national anthem is sung. There are the obligatory admonishments from the announcer to “thank the troops” and “God bless America”. But I must say that naming the local team the “American Defenders” and dressing them in camo, with a big USA splashed across their chests, is going a bit far. Alas, the Defenders failed to defend, losing to the Worcester (for the non-Yankees, that’s pronounced “WUH-stuh”) Tornadoes.

My cousin is a hardcore, obsessive baseball fan (he’d be BFF with Billy Crystal’s character in “City Slickers”). When he discovered I know less about the rules than his 7-year-old daughter, he looked at me with incredulous disgust and asked, in full seriousness, “What do you DO if you don’t watch baseball?” His wife mentioned that she’d like to get Netflix, but there’s really no point, since there’s a 3-hour baseball game on TV almost every day. Their kids are being indoctrinated in the Church of the Mets almost as seriously as they are in the other kind of Church (see finding jesus in greenland for more on that). The 4-year-old has already had baseball lessons with a pro minor league pitcher. Despite all of this, *I* am somehow perceived as the oddball and receive the obligatory razzing for my political beliefs, which somehow seem to be conflated with survivalism, not quite sure why. “Is your new house going to have an arsenal? We won’t bring the kids over if it’s TOO big.” (I assured them it will be buried.) “Gonna have a 2-year supply of freeze-dried food on hand?” (I demurely declined to answer that one.)

There were fireworks after the game, but oddly, two of my cousin’s three kids are terrified of them. “We’re raising seriously neurotic children” his wife commented. So they took off early and missed out on the colorful and noisy glorification of war, replete with soundtrack of Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” and some odious country song that I think was called “Fight for Freedom”. In true Live Free or Die fashion, the stadium lights weren’t turned back on afterwards, meaning everyone had to make their way down lethal concrete steps in darkness.

Total game day attendance: 2245. Similarity to the movie “Bull Durham“: strong (alas, neither Kevin Costner nor Tim Robbins showed up to vie for my attention). Junk food consumed: Italian sausage heaped with grilled peppers and onions, served up by “the Sausage King of Nashua”; fried dough (flung by baby, powdered sugar everywhere). Cute kid proximity alert: Code Red.

At least I didn’t have to listen to “Proud to be an American”.

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Wow, it’s hard to believe it’s been over a year since my red pill post. For those who care (yeah, right), here’s an update on my current opinion of politics:

– still fundamentally immoral? check

– still OK to vote, as a potential means of self-defense? check

– still unclear what an effective alternative is? check

– thoughts on the fact that some people are actually hoping Ron Paul will run for President again, cuz this time he’s really gonna save us? oh god, surely you can’t be serious

Speaking of being serious, I read an excellent article earlier today by the fine folks at Downsize D.C.. They seem most of the way towards swallowing the red pill themselves. Sadly, they’re not all the way there yet. They still think that if they can just get a couple of new laws passed, specifically, the Read the Bills Act and the One Subject at a Time Act, that things’ll be DIFFERENT, goshdarnit. Nevermind the fact that politicians routinely break existing laws all the freakin’ time, so why should anyone expect that they’d follow new ones?

Anyway, I thought I’d share the part of their almost-daily dispatch that makes sense to me (leaving out the part about how things would be ever so much different if we just get some new laws passed). Here ya go, and don’t forget to, at some point this Memorial Day Weekend, bow your head in memory of the millions of people who have lost their lives in various wars for the health of the state; their decomposing remains thank you.

I hear it all the time, in the emails that flood my In-Box and on the radio shows I do. Everyone thinks we need to replace our current Congress with better people. I always have the same reaction — “Are you serious?”

What would it take to get even ONE “good person” elected? You’d need . . .

* A good candidate
* A great campaign
* A ton of money

And you’d still probably lose because incumbents have powerful natural advantages. But even if you did win, one politician can’t pass or repeal laws. You’d need . . .

* Hundreds of great candidates
* Hundreds of great campaigns
* And hundreds of millions of dollars to get them all elected

But before you could even begin to acquire these things you’d have to build a HUGE list of supporters from which to recruit your supposedly good candidates, and from which to raise the hundreds of millions of dollars you’d need. But there’s a problem. Several problems actually . . .

* If you’re trying to do this through a political party many people won’t want to join you because they don’t like the partisan label you’ve chosen
* Many more people won’t like some of your supposedly good candidates as much as you do
* And many more won’t want to join you because either you or your candidates favor some position that’s a deal breaker

But it gets worse . . .

* The campaign finance laws limit how much you can raise from your list of donors
* You must report your contributors to the government, thereby intimidating some large donors who will fear retaliation against their business interests by the incumbents you’re trying to unseat

So, even with a huge army of donors you’ll have a hard time raising the money you need. It will be like trying to fill a swimming pool with a teaspoon. But let’s say you overcome these obstacles, after decades of hard work (because that’s how long it will take). You’re still going to be frustrated . . .

Most of the supposedly good candidates you elect will turn out to be bums. They’ll get to Congress and start behaving like the old gang you worked so hard to replace. This is almost inevitable, because . . .

The system is designed to work that way!

All politicians, even YOUR politicians, have huge incentives to say yes to special interests, to trample your rights, and to give away your money. After all . . .

* They get an ego-boost from saying yes to special interests
* They also grow more powerful by saying yes, NOT by saying no
* They’re spending you’re [sic] money, not their own, so saying yes is easy
* Their new special interest friends can replace you as their source of funding and votes
* And now that they’re in office they know it will be hard for you to fire them

This means you’ll have to start the process all over again, finding new supposedly good candidates to replace the people you thought were good before. Either that, or . . .

You’ll have to find a way to control the people you worked so hard to elect. But, assuming that’s possible, why didn’t you just do that in the first place? Why didn’t you just skip all the time, pain, effort and expense of electing a new set of bums to replace the old set of bums?

Given these realities, why don’t you take the road less traveled, by doing things in reverse?

Instead of recruiting a huge army to replace the existing Congress, recruit that army so you can PRESSURE CONGRESS to do what you want. After all, public pressure brought down the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union, as well as forced Red China to change its ways. It ought to be even more effective here in the United States. . . .

http://www.downsizedc.org/blog/are-you-serious

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