Breaking out of darkness.

Compassion and conscience cannot die.. to imply such would be to say that they could be murdered... they but sleep to nurse deep-held wounds, rest to be awakened again to their endless toil to make a way for mankind to become beyond what they are.

Compassion, conscience, love, acceptance, these are the messages of one Jesus Christ. Not the judgment, not the condemnation, but redemption for all. Love, peace, and hope are only possible so long as you hold them close. Justice is only just so long as there is mercy and compassion.

Should we ever fall so far as to forget who we are, to forget what we are, and to abandon compassion, conscience, and care beside the road, beaten and abused, we would no longer be human.

Those are the very qualities that separate us from the rocks, and trees, the caring for others of our kind, the stewardship of our rights, duties, and privileges, and the freedoms and rights of others.

For, in truth, no man can be denied of their rights. Their freedoms, perhaps, for a time, but their rights cannot be alienated from them. This is the purpose of prison, a limitation on freedoms, not to be punished, but to separate one from the society one has wronged, to allow the wounds on both sides to heal, and to attempt to make right the wrongs which were done against that society.

These laws are not about protection, they're not about preservation, they're not about society, nor about anything but condemnation and control, and maintaining that condemnation, maintaining a scapegoat for corrupt politics and broken societies.

It is compassion that creates societies.. and hardness of the heart that destroys and breaks them. It is fear and anger and hatred that destroy societies.. compassion, love, and forgiveness that allow them to heal.

Many offenders have victims, yes. But none of them have to remain so. They can rebuild their lives, even though there may be scars, they can turn their world into a thing of beauty even so. Allowing yourself to weep, allowing yourself to learn to love yourself again, and accepting that the abuse you were put through is not your fault are all steps on the process, so is anger, so is hurt, so is reconciliation with yourself. And those scars are as much against ourselves as our perpetrators, and left unhealed, the infection grows and may cause us to hurt others.

Our purpose as humans is not to get the most 'stuff'... be it power or anything else on this planet. It is to simply love, help, and heal each other and our world. Not our planet.. our world.

Because we are part of that world. And though our nation is one society, there are many.. and all make larger societies of humanity... and between members of that human race there are no differences, there are no barriers save those made by those who would remain in control.

If any person tells you that you cannot reach, you cannot strive for something that keeps and holds those rights for yourself and others.. he seeks to control. If he seeks to keep you silent, he seeks to victimize.

How many of the very 'worst of the worst' abusers had victims that were afraid to leave? How many of them could not see a way out, so never tried, and often died in captivity? How sadistic were the abusers to make ways out but not let them dare to reach for them? And to kill them when they tried to escape?

This is what madness is. This is hatred, this is fear, this is control, and external control is tyranny.

The ultimate control over the fates of mankind, over everything we are, comes from within. If we lack that control over self, lack that responsibility that comes with it to shape our destinies and by our own shaping, to lead the destinies of others, then we are doomed forever to repeat our mistakes.

That is the ultimate thing they try to deny us... the ability to shape our destinies as our conscience sees fit. The ability to rise above who we were, who they claim us to be, and the ability to burn brightly for the world to see.

Ultimately, the future is what matters.. even if we are not here to see it, and the only indication of the future is by the past, compared with the present. Judging by that past, it is a certainty that things will get worse if we do nothing. More and more bills pass by the desks of Congress making certain of this.

Do we really wish to live on the world which they shape? When personal responsibility becomes collective responsibility.. is it not true, at all times in the past, that all bear the punishments and restrictions of those few who offend? When we can no longer stand up and claim that 'THIS IS WHO I AM' and not be punished for it.. when we can no longer simply be, and create, and work toward the true good of society, where all humankind is free, and recognizes the results of their actions toward one another, and their responsibility for those actions they take...

It is a nightmare coming to pass. It is a damnation of the soul, of the spirit of humanity. It is a destruction of all that mankind holds dear, from the very right to work the ground that they have tilled, to the right to eat the food one has grown or purchased, to the right to keep the money that one has worked for, and to use it to better ourselves, our children, and our society.

That is why I fight. They claimed that I cared very little about others.. but I have learned to care perhaps too much. I see the results of action and inaction, of changes and choices, and I see my own responsibility in it. I pray and work, I dream and hope, and I will not see any person's dreams crushed and stand idly by.

That is personal responsibility, that is the trials of conscience, and that is the reasons I can do nothing else. It is why I fight abuse in all its forms, from abuse of the sexual sort, to the physical and verbal, to the governmental and regulatory, to the very abuse that is inherent in keeping people ignorant of the fact that they are being abused.

That.. is conscience. Not a shame.. not a guilt.. but a fire that burns inside us and pushes us, fuels us, consumes us to make changes in who we are, and what we do. It is not something that says 'I am bad' but something that says 'I must change'. Sometimes that is not enough.. and sometimes we cannot hear it clearly enough. That is what jails and prisons are for.. to silence the external and let the internal speak.

A temporal judgment is a temporal judgment. The greater one is that which lives inside your heart and judges you every day, and that is why so many condemn. It is what they fear in themselves that they judge. They judge not on what is true or real for each individual person, but on the fears in their own hearts, their own being, mind, and conscience, and that judgment, ultimately, is a judgment of their own being.

It's time to make an end to all of this, and neither man nor any court or entity can stop what is coming. Our nation yearns to be free from the heavy yoke that has been placed on us and weighed down so slowly we forget its very weight. We seek and hope, yearn to reach out and dare to dream again.

We yearn to be able to throw paper airplanes, and, childlike, wonder-filled and awe-struck at our world, and not have to work eighty hours a week just to make the least payments, then go further into debt on our credit cards just to eat and get to work.

And I can't ignore it any longer.

Tried By Conscience.
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Fuel for the fire of conscience.

Within each of us lies a spark of the divine, a spark of something beyond what we are, beyond what we may even be... a spark which, when fanned into flame, may become something beyond our own control, leading us eternally beyond our own reach.

I don't know what to do about all the things I'm writing about. I don't see all the deals and things that happen in back rooms, and I don't have the power to change a damned thing in this god-forsaken world. I do know, with a conscience stronger than any I've ever known before, that things have to change.

I can't even say that I touch the edges of what is going on, or know the breadth nor the depth of the depravity into which we've fallen... but I can say that without change, the depth will only increase.

My life at that point matters not at all, what matters is the future. What matters is the world we leave behind for our children, our grandchildren. Even if we have no children or grandchildren, for our neighbor's child, their grandchild, and their children and children's children.

We, as a people, have been robbed. We've been robbed, not only of who we are, but of the very knowledge of the rights and privileges which we have been granted by a just and powerful god.

The name of this god matters not, the powers are innate in all of us humans, in all men, all women, all children. The color of the skin matters less than the contents of who you are. The past matters less than who you choose to be. And that nature, that divinity, that grace, is given by that omnipotent hand, and cannot be taken by any man, woman, ruler, lawyer, judge, president, or dictator.

We are a people who have a spark of the divine. And we must grasp it, and hold on to it, lest we be cast into the darkness which is prepared for us by those who would bind and rivet upon us the chains of slavery.

It is no less slavery, after all, for being legal. It is no less slavery for being enforced by law rather than lash. It is no less slavery for being slavery by writ and judgment.

I'm not here this time to try to find peace. I'm here to make you mad, to challenge you, and to sear your conscience with a hot iron. I'm here to drain the wounds of lassitude, to cajole you into accepting your divinity, and more... to bring to fire that divine thing which you are.

I am, admittedly, a man of ideals. I am a being who, in full knowledge of the stupidity, arrogance, lethargy, and perfidy of man, dares believe in the goodness, the potential, and the kindness that also inhabits each being. It matters not what you call god... we make what god calls our purpose... matter.

And who are 'they' to deny us this? Who are 'they' to forbid us the right to make ourselves better beings, to claim that we cannot change, to declare in their infamy that they are above even our creator?

Who are they to lie to us for what they have declared to be our own good? Who are they to declare that our dreams don't matter? Who are they to make it impossible to live, impossible to eat, impossible to grow, impossible to care for others?

By whatever power is out there in this universe, I exhort you! I deny their claims to power sufficient to break the rights of others! I deny that their government was ever granted such a power!

We as a people have duties, and in these we have been lax. In these, we have fallen short, and in many cases, fallen completely away. We do not believe our votes count... so we do not vote. We do not believe our votes are counted, so we make it true. We fight more and more for each scrap which comes to our hands, to feed ourselves, our children, and beg to be able to simply continue to work, to eat, to breathe.

We breathlessly listen for the next chant of change, look for some hope in the darkness, and find more and more of our choices are no choice at all. Who the hell are they to grasp our lives in the palm of their hands and squeeze out our substance?

They are men.. no better, no worse than we, save for our grant of power to their office, and insofar as they continue to work for the rights of men, that power is granted. Should they fail to discharge faithfully those oaths and affirmations to which they have sworn... then their power has, and must fail.

Our constitution does not guarantee any rights... it only states what a very few unalienable rights are. It states that the government must be limited, and places those limits upon the government, for the interest of the people.

It is not a grant of rulership, but a grant of servitude. It is a grant of power, subject to the will of the people through their representatives, that the republic cannot deny the rights of any man, by the will of any other.

It is a government based on equality.. not equality of the least common denominator, but equality of spirit, equality of the ability to take the opportunities that they are offered, and to make those opportunities for themselves.

It is also a government subverted by special interests, by corporations, by people seeking power. They fail, however, to realize that such power comes, entirely, by their own servitude to the people.

In the past the Romans kept a slave in the chariots of a returning general, reminding them in the adulation of the crowd that they were only human... We, however, are not slaves, nor should we be, but we should remind them that their position in life makes us no less human, and no different from they, and in proportion to the power wielded, ought to be their devotion to those who grant that power.

Yes.. grant that power. It is the people who cede power to the government, not the government who gives rights to the people. The people are the base, the foundation of all government, of all society. They are the people. Of the people, by the people, and for the people.

But what have they done? They've created systems where they themselves often are not tried for crimes, where the rich can afford the lawyers to become free, and the poor too often are railroaded into their prisons. They've created a surging prison population, and made it a near guarantee that anyone coming from that prison will return. Then they turned the prisons into labor camps in competition with US jobs, one of the largest industries in the United States... but out of sight, out of mind, right? I think not.

The switchboard jobs that used to go overseas go to the prisons now. The Federal Reserve takes our assets, the entire assets of our country, and loans them out to overseas interests, as collateral for a massively ballooning debt. Oil prices rise as faith in our unbacked currency wavers, and this widens the gap between the poor and the rich further, the middle class disappears, and before too long, we're in a classic feudalistic society, where some have.. and others have nothing.

Our food is often tainted, our water equally so, our vehicles poor in quality and prone to breaking down costing more and more for repairs. We put in emission control systems which reduce our total fuel mileage, increasing total burned hydrocarbons in the long run, but making the waste gasses invisible. We gain ability to do more and more science, but our wisdom in the uses of that science wanes.

Part of our nature is to question. Most of science, in fact, is questioning, questioning what is, questioning each other, testing the data and hypothesis, testing the outcomes, and then rehashing it between scientists.. but now we're told we can't question, only accept. We're told that in order to secure our nation, to maintain our security, we have to give up more and more rights, and they'll protect us better with the rights ceded.

But how are we more secure? In the prison system, prisoners are still raped, still beaten, still killed, and they have given up the control of nearly all their rights. So does our nation, we have no guarantee of protection, nor any guarantee of police cooperation or even investigation.

We are left, as we always were, to police ourselves.. and meanwhile have given up in most cases the rights and abilities to do so. For protecting ourselves and our properties, we can be sued, imprisoned... or executed.

For protecting our rights we can now be imprisoned, registered, monitored, tortured, and potentially executed.

After these things, and after so many lies from our government, how can we hope that yet one more program may be for the public good? They claim that all their programs are for the public good, but are they? When we see the prices rising, the people losing more and more, the construction of more places of imprisonment, more and more control being placed on the internet, and even placed on the libraries and the press itself, attacks on political speech, the spraying of people behind a barricade with pepper spray...

How is this the nation for which our forefathers fought? How is it that since the 1940s, since Nuremberg, that we have embraced the very philosophies of totalitarianism which we fought?

How is it that our nation has come from one of the most progressive nations in the world, the most protective of personal freedoms and privacy, with the best factories and schools in the world... to one of the poorest? Yes, you look around, look around well, and see all the things here, how could we be poor? Because our very money itself is imaginary. It doesn't exist. It's worth is measured entirely in the weight of the paper, the bits of ink on it... and that isn't worth much at all, cotton rag fiber and ink.

Is it not because of that very leadership that feels it knows best for us? Is it not because, rather than taking hold of the tiller of the government ourselves through our representatives, that almost none of us have times to show them what the issues are?

At this point... it is on our own heads. And I am as ashamed for myself as for you. Our spending beyond our means, our credit deals, our paucity of life to pursue the next 'big thing' while ignoring our families, our pursuit of pleasure beyond our pursuit of knowledge and wisdom...

Who the hell are we? And why, in the name of whatever God is out there... do we let 'THEM' stand for 'US'?

And when will we realize that all the power that the government claims... is really ours?

When will we realize.. that we are the masters of government, not the other way around?

And when will we awaken, and become angry, and tell them this? When will we look and speak out, shout out in our anger, and tell them this needs to change?

When will we rebuild our nation? It can't come from outside, it is OUR nation. WE have to rebuild it, and return it to the dream which stirred the nation from the ashes of history.

And we must vote, speak, think, question, perceive, study, plan, and research upon the nature of the constitution, and the Federalist papers upon which the arguments were founded.

I don't need to tell you about the lies. You know all about them. You live them in a lot of your life. You exist within them, the society, the money, the credit, the fuel and food prices. You see our people overseas, dying, but we don't shout out that we're hurting here.. we're starving here, that each month the checks less and less cover the bills coming in, and that we know at some point they can't cover those bills.

Should we still let 'them' control the government? Should we continue the mistake, or turn it about into a triumph? Should we play their game, or play our own? Should we continue to be puppets, or choose our own play?

The choice is yours. The rights are yours, and by God and all that is holy... the powers are yours as well. I believe that there is a God, that presides over the destinies of nations, and that right now, he is weeping at our inaction.

He is mourning those that fall before the machine of government that we allow to continue the legal fiction of legislating away those rights and freedoms which ultimately derive not from them, but from ourselves.

And he is mourning, right now, that you are still not angry enough to speak. When will you be angry though? Will it be when we no longer have effective means to resist? Will the change come when they have stationed police in your own home, when your children are turned against you, when the schools teach dogma rather than thinking and learning skills? What then?

I do not know what you will choose.. but my course is more clear than any other course in all of my history. It is a fire that burns inside men, and I choose to let it burn, even if it consumes me. No man can be denied something given him from within, by god or by himself.

And no man can ever truly die, so long as he follows his dream. The body may fall, the corpse may rot away.. but so long as his dream lives on, he is not dead.

So dream your dreams, as I dream my own, and spin the webs like Clothos of old. Though my thread may be cut by the shears of Atropos, the fabric continues, and will be stronger for my dreaming.

This is the part of wisdom, of hope, and of the future.

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The dream.. the hope.

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On society and equality: Or what do we ask for?

What is law? Some claim that Law and the Constitution are the guarantors of our rights. Some also claim that those rights are abandoned by a criminal act.. but what is truth?

The truth is, simply, that law is that restraint put upon society by the government, that enforces similarity, attempts to punish the people, in order to maintain order. Law, by nature, can only remove rights, and only be punitive. Anything else is a simple statement, and where enforcement ensues, removes other rights.

The ultimate goal of liberty is equality... but equality is not quite, I think, what we think it is. Equality is not having the same home, nor having the same life as everyone else, nor even the same opportunities as everyone else. Equality is the right, nay, the power and privilege of a sovereign human being, to simply strive for the best one can wrest from this cold and uncaring universe, without infringing the same rights for others.

Some look at equality as a zero-sum procedure... but let us explore this? If one gains freedoms, does another lose them? If one loses freedoms, does another gain?

It cannot be zero-sum if increases on one part are not met with losses on another. Nor can it be zero sum if decreases on any part do not cause increases. Such would be a fallacy... Neither economies, nor societies, nor people gain by the decrease of rights and freedoms. No society gains by losses of these, and losses of rights to even one, causes the rights to be lost to all.

If, in the interest of security, we give up rights, the right to due process, the right to live, the right to strive to redeem one's self, the right to create a world worth living in, and simply, in some cases, the right to be left alone... is this increasing our security? When our government becomes more and more intrusive, when any communication is looked upon with suspicion and censure, when the government starts tearing down the rights that are the foundation upon which its powers were built... what have we left?

You who seek to be more secure... will you really be? Let us take the final example of such 'security'. Maximum security prisons.. are you truly as secure in a society that you have no rights, no property, only the guards watching... and turning their back, as they will?

Are you more protected when none have rights, or when all do? Does the government protect us? Well, to address that, we have to look into the past... and to the Militia in its original incarnation.

Those persons, who, not part of a standing military, were subject to the call of service to our country, in 1792, were required to have, and maintain the best weapon that they could. Via the decentralization of the armories, it made seizure of the weapons by any despotic government more difficult, more troublesome for the intruding foreign or domestic powers.

When we can no longer speak about the problems of the nation, do they go away, or do they become more troublesome, until we dare not turn and look at them, or they would devour us?

Will they not devour us anyway if we do not address them? Will they not become more potent if we wait before their address, and allow them to grow and fruit and spread their seed?

Rights come not from the government, nor from law, nor from a document, nor from any agreement that a man might enter into. Rights come from the state of humanity itself. Rights cannot be taken, only given up.

We throw around the word 'right' so freely anymore. So long as men are unwilling to fight, bleed, and die for their rights, it is not a right. So long as they are willing to deny that right to others... it is no longer a right.

Every despotic government in the world created a class that they hated, that they loathed, then made such a class become more and more monstrous, more and more consuming. Their fervor led them down the roads to fanatacism, to religiosity, to hatred and incivility, and to the destruction of the ends and means of those who would remove them from their power.

When one looks into the past, remember the lessons from Stalin, from Lenin, and from Hitler. Remember the works of Orwell, the statments of Neitzche, and the works of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Are we becoming the monster we saw in the darkness, in order to fight it? Have we gotten so caught up in day to day living that we forget the past, forget the future... and eventually love big brother?

And when all are equal, can not some become more equal than others?

Who are we? What do we want? Do we really want security at this price? If we must be bound in chains, is it better chains of our own making, or chains which we fought at any cost to prevent from being bound upon all?

We, as a nation, bear a sacred, and troubling duty, to confront even the law when the law fails its own tests, to fight even against those who should maintain the law, when the law fails its predicate. We have sworn to uphold and sustain the constitution, but do we?

The constitution cannot argue. it cannot cajole, it is a dead, and silent document... but oh the commentary that it created! The debates, the reason, the proclamation of freedom for all, as a basis for government!

But what does it all mean?

Some laws, as I said before, are necessary to the good of society. Some roles are needful, that of police, of magistrates and judges, of juries, that the rule of law might restrain the more impetuous impulses of man. When does the law become a problem, however? When is it more than law allows, and more than man should bear?

When the law becomes blind, the scales of Justice fixed, and Justice herself becomes bound and gagged to not speak, regardless of the inequity placed upon the scales, then we have opened ourselves to tyranny. Should we then not fight, not try, not work, for remonstrance and re-establishment of the purpose of the government, by peaceable means? Should, if those peaceable means fail, we not engage in that arduous struggle that life has allotted us, and cast our ballot with whatever means we have left?

The past is replete with myriad injustices. The past, also, is replete with those who fought and died to end those injustices.

Simply because I bear no weapon does not make me any less a warrior. My weapons are words, written and honed to sting at the heart, the conscience... to twist and tease at your thoughts, and make you simply consider.

And as long as you choose to think... we both win.

This is society.

If you choose rather to kick aside those who have fallen along the way, to step on them and restrain them further, to beat them while they have no power left...

This is the absence of thought, of justice, of prudence... and it is the end to all means and measures of government save that which is tyrannical.

Tried By Conscience
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