It’s strange how some givens have been obfuscated by politics and fictional notions such as ‘state,’ ‘nation,’ ‘patriotism,’ and ‘security.’ You’d think that some basic issues were either common-sensical or intuitive. In a battle between the citizen and the policeman, I am always with the citizen. This shouldn’t need explaining.
Unless the citizen commits a ‘crime’ and becomes a ‘criminal,’ he remains, just as I described him, a ‘citizen.’ It is supposed to be the policeman’s duty to protect said citizen, not abuse him, attack him, or tear gas him, and certainly not to shoot said citizen unless the citizen posed a lethal threat to another citizen and unless there was no other way to stop him from carrying out that threat of violence.
In any battle between the people and the state, I will always be for the people because, at the end of the day, the state is supposed to cater to the needs of the people. The people are, inevitably, real, whereas the state remains a convenient fiction, an organizing principle, by which to lump human beings together.
In any battle between an empire, no matter how it chooses to label itself, and a separatist movement, I will always stand by the separatist movement because partnerships should never be forced. A fictional entity such as a nation has no right to subsume a group of people against their will, no more than a spouse has the right to force the other spouse to remain, forcibly, in a marriage.
In any battle between truth and falsehood, I will stand by the side of truth because no matter how much it may hurt, falsehoods will only make you weaker and weaker, and eventually, when confronted by an avalanche of truths, anything that you were trying to ‘protect’ from truth will crumble before it.
All of this seems obvious, and it’s both frightening and shameful that we need to re-iterate these givens as often as we do.
The battle for Earth is far from over, and the battle for humanity is barely beginning, and I doubt that any of us will live to see the shape of things to come.
There’s a better future, and it keeps calling to us, and I know that someday, inevitably, it will take hold of us, and we will, finally, humbly, find ourselves embracing it, but it’s early just now, and we are far too young, too arrogant, too within-ourselves.
It’s sad but true; the time is not yet upon us.
