There are a lot of depressed, worried, and surprised people these days and they come from both sides of the aisle. The left obviously sees the dark storm clouds of fascist doom encroaching and the right lives from one triggered explosion of worry to the next. Electing their president hasn’t calmed their worries. Let’s face the faces, they wouldn’t have elected him in the first place if they didn’t believe the country was heading toward destruction. tRump’s presence and power proves their manic clinging toward the cementing of their belief that fear mongering should be the guiding force within their lives.
But I have not brought my laptop out of my tattered backpack here, on the edge of the Verde River, in central Arizona, to discuss politics (well perhaps a little) what I want to delve into is Punk Rock.
Punk Rock is certainly one of those things which is difficult to paint one color. Are punks straight edge or drunks, loyal or promiscuous, politically active or miscreates? They are all these things and often none of them. I think Punk originally evolved in a rebellion against established norms which forced creativity to run through accepted channels in which only the smallest of trickles of people were allowed by large corporations to succeed and produce. Punks instead choose to do as they liked themselves and even if your cassette tape was only heard by fifty people in your scene it was enough because it still fucking rocked hard and everyone treasured it more than some top forty crap with a stylized cover.
Good, now that’s out of the way I can get to my point. As people around me panic and dwell in a dark place ruminating over the news and distressed because they feel the government is bad and turned against them, I personally remain unchanged because I’ve usually hated and had little, if no, trust in the government since I was thirteen.
Yes, sure, the government has programs to help the needy (Too many hungry mouths start rebellions) and roads are nicer when they are pothole free. Although I consider myself an anarchist at heart, I understand how constructing a framework of monitoring and control often helps more than it harms. Until you are on the other side of our guns and boy howdy do we have a lot of guns.
Still at a government’s core there are powerful people seeking more power and rich people seeking more riches. Yes, not everyone is a scoundrel, but most of them are. They want to tell you how to live the life they think you should be living. They want you to produce in the appropriate manner. Most politicians come from a background in Law. Laws to make sure you stay within the lines. Try to color outside the lines and you could enter the largest prison system to have ever existed on Earth.
But let me steer this back to my point. Instead of gasping as we plunge toward fascism, I sort of look up from my book and nod, “Hmm, it was always there, just a little more noticeable now than in the last few years.”
The government of the USA has never shied away from being evil. To get my undies in a bunch over something which has always been this way is like getting mad shit stinks.
Could you tell me a time our country wasn’t committing acts of evil?
Here’s a quick overview:
- 1776-1880 The United Staes committed genocide against the indigenous populations
- 1776-1851 Slavery was legal in the USA
- 1898 The United States steals land from Mexico
- 1945-Present The United States helped Underdevelope countries in order to steal their resources and have the poor provide cheap labor ruining indigenous farming and plunging nations into poverty.
I could go on but to list every war we’ve used to dominate other cultures would take pages.
Again, my point, and perhaps this is just me personally, but I feel listening to Punk Rock and my own research into the history of governmental fascism and control has left me underwhelmed when I see it happening now. What do people expect? We have more people and less resources. We have an environment which is crumbling and each year will be harder to produce as much as the one proceeding it. Add to this the largest wealth gap in history. Elmo Musk had the purchasing power of 30,000,000 families. How many restaurants will he support, how many shoes will he buy? Are you surprised the economy is tanking and businesses are closing when one man hordes the buying capital of 100,000,000 people?
Listen I get it. We always think the years we are alive must be more important and we are experiencing things no one ever has before, but that’s just narcissistic bullshit. Go buy an orange for 40 cents which even the king of England might get to try once in his life five hundred years ago. Face it you still have it better than 99.999999% of all humanity had unless you are one of those people your tax dollars paid to send to El Salvador.
Me…I’m not saying I like what I see happening, that I won’t fight against it, or I won’t try to help my family and friends survive through it. Let’s just say my shock meter is staying at a comfortable zero. I would never have to say I saw this coming because I knew it was already here.
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Dak is asked to hunt down renegade clones. His main problem, he’s dating one.
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WildernessPunk 