Last Straw

The Last Straw…

I heard today that Rupert Murdock has bought the Wall Street Journal. If this is true, it may represent the Last Straw for me as far as my support and continued legal citizenship of the US.

The irony is that RM is not even American, but Australian (though I understand he is a US citizen). What hope is left? The truth cannot come out with out the media—and RM seems to own most of it. There are blogs and independent films, but what is that?? The average person watches the news or reads the newspaper. There is still Time Magazine. I am blue, discouraged, and without much hope left.

Our country is waining; we are in the twilight, slowly fading, degrading and grinding down. Our peak is now behind us and decay lies before us. Perhaps it is inevitable. Is it our responsibility to slow the fall, do we make the most of what is left? Is our responsibility to our country or to ourselves?

I am against everything our country is becoming, though I respect what our country has been. We have been truly great, truly powerful. Our birth and inception was unprecedented, moral, and courageous. Our causes in war have been (often) just and altruistic (well…). Our thinkers have been ahead of their times, our innovations paradigm changing. It has been us, Americans, that have ushered in and dominated the modern industrial times, for better and for worse.

But as all empires we have corrupted ourselves. We will destroy from the inside what our enemies failed to destroy from without. We have grown rich, lazy, and ignorant. We no longer carry the flame that motivated and burned in the hearts of our forefathers. We quail under the same fear that lifted them to greatness.

We have forgotten what it was like to want for food, for shelter, for life. Even those who are lacking seem not to be aware of it, blind to their anemia. Our public lacks health care, education, and we are told, no, we have the very best. No, we aren’t lacking at all. No reason to become upset. That exactly.

We have become a passive people, told what to think without option, without justification; herded like cattle with fear as a prod—and always in the same direction: sedation. While slowly our freedoms are wheedled from our distracted and willing hands.

That we submit willingly is the hardest to accept and yet it is so. We have been so confounded we have turned upon ourselves, gnawing our own tail, while Prometheus laughs at his guile.

Jefferson said that, given a choice between the two, he would choose a newspaper before a government for the wellbeing of a people. We see today the wisdom of these words and consequences of their negation. Today we have no newspaper, no media free from the propaganda of the regime. It is all one story, one shabby lie, so ugly and insidious that is existence only becomes possibly without a contrary, without a mirror to represent its ugliness.

We are living in Orwell’s 1984. How can we fail to see? We fight in the name of freedom, yet each day our freedoms are taken from us, if not given up freely in the honorable name of Homeland Security or the War against Terror. We have built the walls of our own cell and we walk in of our own will. We are told it is a safer place and it is perfectly, perfectly true.

I stand against this with every fiber of my being. I smelled a rat. I am not lazy and I am not scared and I will not be told what to believe without justification and without option or alibi. I have searched and I have found alternatives to the stories we are told, and in comparison the sanctioned truth turns to dust, obvious and discernible by any application of intelligence. It is a sham, and a poor one.

And yet it prevails. We are too lazy as a people to act on our gut feeling that “something just ain’t right.” No it is not. It is not right and I know it. I can not make others know it. I cannot scream it over the rooftops of our once great nation. No one will hear. I cannot buy up all the newspapers and tv stations like Rupert Murdock.

Jefferson knew, Orwell knew. My vote will not stem the flood or brake the slide. But… but I can not participate. I can step back and no longer pay my money to wars I think unjust, money I with went to schools, health care, or our poor and elderly. I do not sanction the killing of Iraqis, Afghanis or Iranians.

But to not pay taxes is to not receive the benefits afforded to citizenship, else I would be a hypocrite. I must take what is mine and leave, find a new one, one in which I could hold some amount of faith in its policies and constitution. I would become an expatriot, an outcast from my home, from my family; I would abandon all that was good with all that has gone to rot. Could I do that? Must I do that to be true to my own principles? Is it right?

I don’t know. But I am disgusted. I have the right to. Do I have a mandate? What would Thoreau do? It is just to disobey unjust laws. What options are their in an age without the possibility of revolution?

Hermann Hesse and Thomas Mann both left Germany with the rise of the Nazi party in the 1930’s. They couldn’t beat the Nazis, but they disalign themselves; they chose not to participate in what they saw as evil. What more could they have done and what difference would have been served?