This Carbon Based Life

By David Glenn Cox

“Come, gather round people wherever you roam, and admit that the waters around you have grown. Accept it that soon you’ll be drenched to the bone if your time to you is worth saving. Then you better start swimming, or you’ll sink like a stone. For the times they are a changing.”  – Bob Dylan

This is not your America. This is not the land of your birth. Where you were raised and nurtured, and educated. This is a strange, alien land where you’re not a citizen as much as you’re a prisoner of the state, out on work release. Gianni Infantino, the president of the FIFA World Cup warns, warns children! That just buying tickets and  booking hotel rooms is no guarantee you will be allowed inside the United States. And if admitted, you must allow access to your cell phone and social media to the authorities. After you’ve paid for your visa, of course. Once inside, you could be arrested at any time for anything and deported to Ecuador or even Texas, where you could be held incommunicado for an indefinite period of time.

The loss of your country is similar to the death of a loved one. It’s difficult to accept at first that they are really gone. Your mind wants to revert to the comfortable days past before their loss. But accept it now. That the America you loved is now dead and gone. It will help you to see things more clearly once you can accept the truth. This is a totally lawless government. Armed with a secret police and concentration camps. A government that kills with impunity. A government that wars with impunity. A government that sues news organizations and arrests journalists.

A government which has alienated the whole world. A government which needlessly antagonizes our former allies. The American Fascist regime meets with Alberta separatists attempting to destabilize a neighboring foreign government, which won’t do as they are told. A government that doesn’t negotiate differences, it threatens violence and military overthrow. Is that the America that you grew up with? When Bush the lesser opened the Guantanamo prison and began gathering tortured confessions. It occurred to me that what they will do to someone else’s children today. They will do to your children tomorrow. It will never stop until it’s made to stop. You cannot negotiate good behavior from criminals.

The Justice Department has morphed from defending citizens to offending citizens. The courts have become powerless harlots. The Supreme Court authorizes everything that has been done so far. This government is the most lawless and unconstitutional government in American history. And the Supreme Court answers, “That’s fine.” The Congress has skated a fine line between audacious contempt to complicit accomplices. They should be held just as responsible as the ringleaders. They won’t save us! They’re working on someone else’s payroll. Chuck Schumer is a Judas goat. He talks a good game before making quick work of us and making deals with the criminals. Do you understand? You can no longer trust the so-called, good guys.

I would sincerely wish to see peaceful change. But the criminals are planning on rigging the midterm elections. So peacefully requesting change from murderous criminals is just whistling your way into the concentration camp. Gee, maybe if we ask Mr. Hitler nicely, he’ll relent. “We must all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately,”– Ben Franklin.

Recently in my little town, I’ve seen signs going up offering land for sale. It means the investor class sees the end of the rainbow. The bloom is off the rose and the bust is coming. Sell now, while maybe you still can. Americans can’t afford new cars or new homes. Home prices are starting to crater in the boomtowns of Texas and Florida. Amazon lays off 16,000 employees. Not because they have to, but because they can. You’ll just have to work a little faster, Fred, or maybe you’re next. Fast food joints are being priced out of the market not because the food is too expensive, but because the people have no money and wages haven’t kept up with inflation in decades. Through both Republican and Democratic administrations, until now; it is reaching critical mass. The luxuries are long gone; now they struggle affording necessities.

The consumer economy is like a pizza. If you give enough pizza to the 1% there isn’t enough pizza left to go around. Greed is a drug, the more you get, the more you want. “Is it a right of life when the young children of this country are being reared into a sphere which is more owned by 12 men than it is by 120,000,000 people?” – Huey Long

I wish there were an easier way. But that is the trouble with dictatorships. You don’t get to choose your way. Violence is the American way. Fascists only respond to violence, and they laugh and snicker at all other methods. Maybe you think I’m being hyperbolic? And maybe I am. But I started studying Fascism and authoritarian governments many years ago. One of the best books on the subject is “The Gulag Archipelago.” It can’t happen here, it can’t happen here! The author, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, was a captain in the Russian Army. He had been wounded and decorated for bravery. But he wrote a letter to a friend criticizing shortages at the front and received a ten-year prison sentence. He criticized the leader and went to jail for it! Does that somehow ring a bell?

But throughout all of its 1,100 pages one quote has stuck with me throughout the years.

“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 

It is a sad commentary on this country that in order to bring about change its citizens must die in the streets. No matter how peacefully they protest. I could name a dozen massacres and then go on to name a dozen more.

“The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is rapidly fadin’
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the times they are a-changin’ – Bob Dylan

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

“…being in a position to know and nevertheless shunning knowledge creates direct responsibility for the consequences…” ― Albert Speer