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Time to rise up, raise hell for a change

We’ve always heard that it is the responsibility of the young generation to be that massively annoying swarm of burning ideology that gathers together to shout about revolution and reform. It has typically been the older generation to say this, implying that they recognize the loss of their own ability to change their world. Our wise elders claim to have seen the mountaintop and understand what it takes to plant the flag. It is a wonder that they never did it themselves and elected instead to turn around and destroy their children’s world.

It is important that I note my reluctance to criticize my generation for its idle behavior because the abovementioned claim comes from a people who’ve abandoned the great hike and traded their souls for a three-car garage and a business degree. Of course, not all of our parents turned out to be cowards and dupes, but the great majority opted for a plea bargain to forsake the struggle they started in the 1960s.

Never mind our parents though. They’ve lived rough lives and ought to be left alone to think about what they’ve done.

You and I on the other hand are faced with action . . . But, oh mercy, here is the great pause. We have problems we need to take care of. Problems that are not of our creation, but problems we are faced with nonetheless.

I cannot say exactly what must be done to rid ourselves of our terrible debt, to fix our deteriorating planet, to guarantee the future of freedom and health. We can hardly afford an education while feeding and sheltering ourselves. The vicious world that our parents have left us is making vast efforts every day to eat us alive and make us a part of its own digestive system.

It is impossible for me to write this and pretend to convince myself, and all of you, that there are political solutions to our problems. Governments are run by selfish old men and women who care little for a planet that they are soon to leave behind. But government isn’t the biggest of our troubles. Immense corporations like Time-Warner, Proctor and Gamble, ExxonMobil etc., are the prime enemy. The criminals who manage these thieving, murderous conglomerates have seized our government, and it has become an instrument of persuasion. We are experiencing a new and improved manner of slavery. We have become numbers, not individuals. What is your name? Is it Mike or Joe, Sarah, Nicole, Pablo…? It doesn’t matter. You are a number. That is all.

This is reality, folks. Our only hope now is to get wild and risk everything we thought we knew in order to build a more perfect world for our children and ourselves. We arrive back to the question, that great pause in our thoughts between suggestion and action. What in the world are we to do?

There are those who’ve thought it best that they abandon all facets of modern society and hit the road as drifters and vagrants, sleeping next to railroad tracks, drinking themselves into oblivion so to combat the overwhelming pressures of assimilation. Those people have been beaten senseless by the world and found themselves trapped in the county jail.

The masses are unlikely to abandon the security of contemporary life, and without their support the nomads of society will remain as such. There are other means by which to accomplish reformation though: Rise up and raise hell.

It has been said that the most effective way to tinker with the modern system is economically. This translates to all of us (indeed all of us, the people) refusing to pay our taxes which grow to be billions of dollars every week to support fraudulent wars and evil schemes to shore up the rich, refusing to work and utterly refusing to sponsor our tyrannical government.

It is our constitutional duty to make these refusals.

There will be hardships and things will get much worse before they can get any better, but any means to end the current destruction of life that we live to support would be valid.

I have a proposal: I’ve mentioned it before and have always been serious as hell. The Democratic National Convention, or DNC, is coming to our doorstep. This is our opportunity to rise up and show these phony excuses for human beings dubbed politicians how very unhappy we are. Let us scream at the top of our lungs at every attempt they make to speak at us. Let us shower them with putrid, rotten fruit. I’ll buy it. We will spit on them and deny them any of what little respect we might have left. Let us rise up and raise hell.

You have my e-mail address. I am now recruiting.