Freedom and What We Give Them

 (Although written in 2010, like most politics, things remain the same. It wasn’t anymore then about Obama as it is now about Biden and others, in positions of power before or since him. Currently, (2024) we are in what I believe to be a much more dangerous world as we, everyone one of us, are being moved inexorably forward, helpless and hopeless. It’s still true though, without us they are nothing but only what we give them.)

(2010)

First of all, I want to try and rectify any potential misconceptions about the previous post before I go on with this new related rant. If I’m not successful, so be it.

I believe in freedom overall, but my belief has a limit. I believe in benevolent freedom.

In regard to sexual freedom, I believe in consensual sex between age defined adults.

So, I believe gay and straight have the same human rights as far as sex goes. I could apply this principal to any of the freedoms I believe in. We as humans are equal, everywhere, all the time, regardless of country, ethnicity, etc.

So, I also believe the greatest threat to everybody’s human rights freedom is the government. From the moment in this country when it was stated that “all men are created equal” we Americans have prided ourselves, without much humility, in expanding/explaining what “all men” really means. What part of “all” isn’t understandable?

Part of this “pride” is exactly what the problem is. We have given (and in some cases it was taken by) governments, our right to ‘self-determination” which is another term thrown about but even more obscure as the phrase “all men”

This giving up and eventually conceding the right of government to define what is freedom and what is not, comes from an early historical concession, giving up our rights to our own relationship with god.

Institutional Religion has defined our relationship with god, while Institutionalized Government has defined our relationship to each other.

How did this come about? By force, with force, by fear.

Force is the Prince, the Knights Templar, the Church, the small, despotic armies from Sparta to Saddam Hussein, and the large empire builders, Alexander to Biden, et al.

They’re all the same.

People have always formed consensual social relationships because it is necessary in order for providing each other through mutual consent the necessities of living. Cooperation has been built out of necessity and not necessarily on the basis of a mutually acceptable term of conditions. Sex has a history of being coercive and on top of that, law made coercion legal. Sharing other aspects of living, i.e. food, territory has always been based on who had the food, who didn’t, who had the territory, who didn’t, usually defined by who did. Life has never been easy, paradisical, except in stories and fables. Wealth for anyone certainly adds an element of paradise to some people’s lives and since universal concepts of freedom have come to be realized, freedom has taken on an aspect of seeking paradise, pursuit of it has become a monologue of self-interest, for those who seek it. But freedom is like food or territory. It’s a matter of mutual consent again. The “freedom” to restrict someone else’s freedom is an oxymoron.

When force is applied to mutual consent, coercion and distrust and eventual collapse of the consensus takes place, creating a void which is always manipulated by any new dominant order,

To fill with whatever, it’s needs are. Societies are restructured. That’s why the military is the main instrument in this domination and usually, a complete destruction of a society’s infrastructure is necessary, regardless of whether of not, more likely not, the general, innocent population becomes the primary victim of its own governments defeat, usually by having freedoms gained taken away or sometimes, the state gives more freedom/privileges to a special class.

What about the general population of the “greatest military in the history of the world” as Obama says we are? Well, Obama, or Bush, or Clinton, or Biden, or Trump, whatever you want to be called, this is what your type of thinking has done.  

You have allowed the US Military to suck the lifeblood from our democracy as if we were the conquered, and in an idealized way, we are. We have stood by while allowing and giving all of our resources and future security over to an unelected corporate cabal who, through bribery (which we politely call “contributions”) and manipulation of world economic markets, has utilized our public resources to dominate these global markets in oil and other natural resources, outside of America. In some ways, this is the way it’s always been, and in other ways, it’s much more dangerous and devious now, as we are all being convinced to continue breaching our common sense and our own nature in lieu of accepting a highly structured assault on our human rights, our freedoms.

So, gays can now be themselves in the military but they can’t marry, (Biden says its inevitable). Marriage, another institution I wonder why we insist defining ourselves through religious and civil institutions which almost always put constraints on our human nature and pit each of us against the other but at least it’s a benevolent institution, legalizing and standardizing love.

This assault has taken decades. From the corporation as “individual” or person, the new majority(60) rules of the Senate, the legalization of our democracy, the acceptance of Zionist atrocity over decades, the privatization of public education, the gradual elimination of social security in exchange for the gambling hall of Wall Street, to the gradual acceptance of fact/fiction/contradiction that we entered a war by mistake, a mistake created by our fear, although we still need to rationalize in order to make heroes out of those who follow orders, because to do otherwise would be (what?) a “sin”, an “affront “ to our principals, an ‘anti-american” insult?

Accepting this war ( war in Iraq) and claiming everything about it as patriotic, pride etc, is like  standing by while a violent, horrible murder takes place. ( George Floyd had not happened yet).Its one big bully club made up of mostly men, who went to Yale or a place like it, never really left high school. If it wasn’t so deadly, it would be funny.

Welcome to the Brotherhood of Give Em Hope. We all stand and watch.

 

Where in the fuck did we lose the notion that an illegal war, a war of imagined self defense, is a war of national pride and nationalistic love of country?

Obama, you have mined the fears and mind fuck that political and corporate thugs created to thwart the public power supposedly given to us by high minded concepts such as democracy and freedom. 

This war and that war have been going on since before you were born, and I would have you mind the words of your own Secretary of Defense when he said “You’re looking at the world through a soda straw.” There is a method to the madness of constant strife and now you have opted, yes chosen, to ignore the pig in the poke.

A mindset, as if being in the military is the last bastion of patriotism. It didn’t work for black men in the early nineteen hundreds who were led to believe that if they fought it would ease their civil rights struggle. It didn’t.

You and all your entitled ilk belittle the persistence and positive charity of millions of Americans as well as others throughout the world who truly have sacrificed without profit or patriotic motive, trying to make the world a better place. Stop acting as if joining the military and fighting in it is the ultimate charitable contribution. You look like a shill.