12/14: “I.”

I used to watch politics as a dull-eyed child, like it was a show put on before me; something I could watch and laugh at and stand away from that I could not touch and that could not touch me. It was a comedy of errors with transparent plots and obvious logical fallacies

I remember being a middle schooler and laughing at illegal immigration – saying, “Well, if they’re illegal by definition, why don’t they take care of it like that?”

I didn’t understand it. Sometimes I still don’t.

I forget that it’s not about logic or common sense or The Constitution, as I once did; What a naive child I was! Now, I know the truth; It is not a show I watch but a circus I am attending, my ticket my birth right, my civil duty, my calling and my passion. They’ll trip you up in their world of “theories”; Do not let them. Do not give an inch when it comes to philosophies.

If your eyes are open, you’re a soldier on the field. This is not “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.” This is not a game or a show for your entertainment. “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbably, must be the truth.” Sherlock Holmes said that. And I’ll be damned if I’m going to overlook the advice of one of the greatest fictional detectives ever crafted. What I mean by this is the following: Know what you are fighting for. This is the first step.

The second is to know what you are fighting against. I used to float through biased history classes with my mouth shut because all I knew about what I believed was this deep, gut feeling that they were right. And I knew these were not logical arguments. A good cop will tell you how important your gut is in determining something important. I remember sitting through a discussion on abortion, freshman year, and being brought to tears. I put my head down and let it roll over me. I couldn’t explain it, but I had that gut feeling, man, These people are wrong. I did my research. I spent many a lonely night at the computer with Google, the blog-o-sphere, and The Washington Post. I spent hours upon hours with my grandfather, asking for his opinion on everything, asking my mom. Contrasting them. Asking for books and watching CNN and Fox News and absorbing it all, taking in the differences.

All the while, I got this awful feeling about the media, this nagging sense that something was not right here.

I guess it wasn’t until last year that I started being horrendously obnoxious about politics. I read The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. Everything changed. Everything. It got into my head and changed everything around. I’d never felt so shaken to my core. From that day on, I was a blank slate, finding and fitting ideas into this new, morally sound being, seeing what fit and what didn’t.

No square pegs in round holes. Contradictions, Rand taught me, did not exist; in this way, by testing the waters of everything, reading, writing, debating, listening, I discovered who I was. My brother had given me the book for Easter; My brother, the fucking messiah of information. Maybe this is childhood idolization talking. His whole room is a library. He knows everything about everything and then some. He gives me books for every occasion, every birthday, every Easter, every Christmas, I get a book.

We read The Fountainhead at the same time. I grew up with parents who didn’t read one word they didn’t have too; A dad who read non-fiction work books day in and out for his job and my mother who liked to buy biographical Beatles books and look at the pretty pictures. I don’t know how they ended up with children who loved the fictional magic of the written word and aspired to it, but here they are, four kids later, all of them breezing through novels – Yes, even the seven-year old, whose nose is in The Jungle Book as we speak. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand was what did it for me. It was so fresh and beautifully crafted, the meaning so clearly projected, that it was hard for me to put it down. I lived the book, man, from beginning to end, I lived it. When I opened it to a page for a reading session, it was like holding my breath and going underwater, becoming surrounded by something entirely new. This was how I was introduced, formally, to Collectivism and the Individual. This was when I fell in love with cities and skyscrapers and architecture because Ayn Rand taught me what they really meant. This was when I made a beeline for my library to pick up Atlas Shrugged.

I suddenly became very afraid because I finally understood it. Everything. Their theories, their phony philosophies, everything. And here I was thinking like a fool that socialists really meant it, and it was just people who were inherently bad and ruined it. No, fuck that, no. Collectivism can hide itself under many names, S.E.I.U, Socialism, civil justice. It may hide under the more friendly sounding ones, like Health Care Reform. The devil takes many names. Whether you believe in him in flesh and bone or simply simile and metaphor, there is the existence of real evil in this world, and let me be frank with you; Collectivism is evil. Socialism is evil. Anything less than the full freedom we deserve under laissez-faire capitalism is evil. We can’t keep saying those who disagree with the obvious are “misguided”. They are not. Ignorance is not innocence, and they will not be saved. When all their plans crumble to the ground and their theories fall apart and it’s too late, the cop outs of ‘misguidance’ and ‘ignorance’ will not save them from the same fate as those of us that rang the warning bells ’till we grew weary. The difference between the radical liberals(asses or elephants) and normal, rational, conservative human beings – is the question of suicide. We are all afflicted with a terminal case of living.

Conservatives, capitalists specifically, want to make the best out of this. We are an ambitious breed. We have big dreams and are willing to sweat to get there. We may harbor deep fears about our futures, but this won’t deter us from taking chances; we want to see what’s next. We want to make this life as fulfilling as possible and leave a future that is sustainable for our children. The radical Marxists, the liberals, the fucks who sit in the white house twiddling their thumbs and voting on bills they didn’t write, let alone read – Ah, now, where are they driving us towards? Suicide. Impossible futures, I see them full of clouds of smoke and tyranny.

They cannot look us in the eye and they won’t. It only takes a second – a metaphorical second of us not looking for them to finish putting in place what they need to, so that in the case of a manufactured emergency, they can seize it all. The sooner you open your eyes to it and see where they’re stretching their tentacles the better off you are. Those who are not wary, this question to you I pose: Is it not a good idea to keep an eye on the organization that controls virtually everything about your life? Is it not reasonable to find it disconcerting when your employees start treating you like a pet instead of a force to be reckoned with? Have they forgotten who pays their salaries and keeps food on their table? When is ‘too much control’ going to be too much for you, those who are still sleeping? If life has taught you anything, it is that nothing is outside of the realm of human possibility; it is that politics are a circus of corruption and a cycle of lies and pretty words. It’s that a president shouldn’t need a teleprompter to look at the American people, right into the eye of the camera, and tell us everything is going to be fine. If life has taught you anything, it should be the fact that politics in this sense is a giant seesaw in which government grows; individualism shrinks. Once large entity to overtax you and swallow you up. It’s about power. I don’t know why, but it’s about power. Once upon a time, there were men who had the courage of their convictions, who believed in things so strongly that they’d stake their lives. Where the hell are you now?

These were men who understood what it meant to believe in something purely for the sake of the truth. We saw it spark in some journalists; few politicians, but the memorable ones; we saw it in historical peaceful protests through Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr, among others. And me, I first saw it in a book, who’s binding has long since cracked. I first saw it through a philosopher, immigrant, and wordsmith named Ayn Rand. She gave me step one. I know what I’m fighting for; it’s the proven truth that we are not as free as we think we are. That everything that’s happening now has happened before. That their dirty games will collapse and drag us all under. Will we wait for that day? Strip down the arguments to their bare bones; Morals, philosophy, and theory.

What does it mean when they tax the rich? That they demonize profit. That they demonize capitalism. This is a prime example. Once we kill Robin Hood, we can move along to greener pastures. And once you get it – And I mean, get it – become a recruiter for the cause. Wave your freak flag high, man. I wear my socialist Obama t-shirt and buttons all the time .

If you want to pick a fight with me about it, let’s talk; I’m happy I’ve provoked you to share and even attempt to have an opinion. A lot of people are apathetic until they ask me about my strange pins, and then the floodgates open up; they reveal how little they actually know, but at the same time, you can see this look in their eyes; Why am I saying that? What does it mean? Am I right or wrong? And I’m one of those people who constantly thinks I’m right. I know what I stand for. I might be bitter at times, cynical, maybe I sound a bit paranoid. I don’t care. Your Che shirts piss me off. I will call you on them. I’m not a conservative conservative; my tongue is biting.

Call Sarah Palin a cunt again at my lunch table and I’ll be less kind than I was the first time; and don’t you dare call me racist because I disagree with my President. That’s right; He doesn’t just belong to you. If you’re not loud – if you don’t defend your principles – you might as well have none at all. Be brave. Be loud. Be respectful, and be willing to listen.

That might be the hardest part. After you get things figure out, don’t be thrown off by the arrogance of people who might be on the opposite side of the aisle. They might open your eyes to something you didn’t see before. Rand wrote, “Before once can say ‘I love you’, one must first know how to say the ‘I’.” What does the ‘I’ entail? Who are you?

One is defined by one’s values. What values do you hold dear? Why are they worth defending?

Figure yourself out, youth. This is the only period of your life when you will have unlimited time for books and music and information in order to do just that.