This Carbon Based Life

By David Glenn Cox

It was irresponsible! That’s what it was. What the hell was I thinking? A big-name money-making website with breakrooms and pension plans could never publish a piece calling for violence against our assassins. I stand chastised and contrite. It is always wrong to promote violence! Always, always, always! Even when the fictional Jesus overturned the fictional tables of the money changers and promoted violence with his fictional whip inside the temple. Fictional Jesus was just plain wrong!

I was on a bus trip, and I stopped in the gift shop and bought a book to read for the road. You’d probably hate it. It was “The Gulag Archipelago” by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. I’d seen a news blurb about this poor Russian man’s life struggling in the Gulag. About how the book was written on scraps of toilet paper and smuggled out, page by page.

Solzhenitsyn was a convicted criminal sentenced to ten years at hard labor for his crimes. While he was a Captain in the Soviet Military, he had written a personal letter to a friend. He wrote about how everyone was patriotic and dedicated and all but, (Risky territory here) there were so many shortages. But he trusted “the bearded one” (Joseph Stalin) would fix everything. That’s anti Soviet activity right there pal. Who do you think you are throwing shade on our Premier?

An Idaho school teacher was ordered to take down a sign which read; “Everyone is welcome here!” Because obviously, everyone is not welcome here. You can’t say that anymore! Let me show you how your media operates. The USDA working under the auspices of his majesty the King has cancelled the Local Food for Schools’ program and the Local Food Purchase Assistance program. A big government program providing fresh fruits and vegetables for schools and food banks. But the media focus only on the loss to the poor farmer, not the loss to millions of hungry school children or the needy. Sophistry over statistics! Sometimes the loudest voices say nothing at all!

The King decrees! Let us now take food from the mouths of hungry children and the needy and call it progress! The Republicans dance in the aisles calling out, “Let’s go after the old people next!” The blood red Republicans want Eighty billion dollars in Medicaid spending cuts. Just on average for your state that is around a 1.6 BILLION dollar cut. Twice that for California and half that for Connecticut. They tell you with a straight face they are only cutting fraud, waste and abuse. Yeah, like cutting the fraud waste and abuse in election oversight.

The overriding theme of the book if you’d like to avoid the 700-page read. Was Solzhenitsyn’s revelations. About how this evil system had been going on all around him, and he never ever noticed how evil it really was, until he himself was arrested. Then he began noticing all the others who were arrested for even less. College professors or simple workmen who got too loud while drinking.

Do you have any idea what 80,000 job cuts will do to the VA? You might as well load them up and send them all to Auschwitz . The end result is just the same. It would be wrong to promote violence against the Law, even if the law proposes violence against millions of helpless Americans. I would be wrong! Absolutely unequivocally wrong! I would be a low-down rabble rousing vile piece of shit and they would be staid honorable politicians with their oil paintings hanging in the great hall. My voice means nothing, their voice means impending death for millions.

I love Jamie Raksin. I think he’s a great guy with his heart in the right place. But I think his idea to flood the Trump Administration with Freedom of Information requests. To be the dumbest idea, I’ve heard since the anti-tank snowball. Let’s write that Mr. Hitler an angry letter. That’ll straighten him out!

That was a theme of the Gulag Archipelago. Don’t wait! Don’t expect it to fix itself! Understand the situation in the now, and understand it will only deteriorate. The time to fight your arrest is now. You must always follow the law! You must never advocate violence against those trying to kill you. Understand yet?

A profit-making publication could never publish anything calling for violence. Can we have a dollar or ten? We’re out on the front lines fighting for you! And we need money! Can we have some money? Visa/Mastercard, PayPal? We’re fighting for you! We get thousands of dollars for our ad space, but can we have a dollar? Like Henry David Thoreau said, He walks through life dragging a successful website behind him. And the website requires furniture and drapes and the more successful it becomes the less independent it must be. It could all go away if you say the wrong thing. Not everyone is welcome here.

It’s like that funny story I heard about George Washington once. He was attacking the British on Christmas Day 1776. A clear violation of the King’s law! As they approached a Hessian guard post. Ole George turns to his Adjutant, Alexander Hamilton and says, “Alex, go kill them!” and Alex answered, “yes sir.” Then he promptly went and killed them all.

I bet you didn’t know ole George talked like that. We are taught he was such a nice friendly old man who had deserters shot sometimes. Happy slaves sang spirituals, while busting their backs on his plantation in the hot Virginia sun. He would never kill anybody! That would be against the law. Throwing tea into Boston harbor dressed as Native Americans was an act of terrorism! That tea belonged to honest British merchants!

Solzhenitsyn’s book is not about what happened to him. It is about what could, and is, happening to YOU! This how it starts, and you must always, always, always obey the law. If the law says, “All Jews or Hispanics must report downtown. Well, I guess that’s just the law now.”

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?… The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If…if…We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation…. We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”  ― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn 

“I shot the Sheriff, but I didn’t shoot the deputy.”