A Nuclear Middle Finger

I currently have a Primary Objective in life: Get a job as an aircraft mechanic in Cascadia. Followed shortly by a house. My stated backup plan for the last four years has been, if missions didn't work out, to get a house and a dog and spend my weekends in the hills.

There are two Secondary Objectives, either of which may work out (but not both together). 1. Attempt to work with MAF again, because certain MAF staffers occasionally tell me to keep trying, as they want me working with them, regardless of HQ. 2, attempt to work with OCMC, although I wouldn't be fixing airplanes with them, as they don't have any. Both of those groups will want to see that I'm settled somewhere, regularly attending church, and have managed to be healthy. So both secondary objectives mesh well with the primary objective.

Another Primary Objective is to find a wife. Because I have no memory of a time where I haven't wanted to find a nice girl and start a family. I wanted that when I was 5, and I want that now that I'm 30. Of course, one does not simply walk into Mordor and pick up a girl to match that ring, so I've taken to slowly and carefully deliberating over each and every Christian girl I meet that I'm even remotely interested in. I won't even ask a girl out for coffee if I'm not 100% sure of what I'm doing, and more importantly, WHY. The most manipulate, petty, and critical women I've ever met have been Christians, so I'm very, very careful with who I get involved with.

Getting married might delay my 18-30 month timeframe for going back into missions work, and that's fine, but I will absolutely not put that goal in jeopardy for a woman. I know this because I can point to specific women that I haven't tried to get to know simply because they weren't interested in missions. I've had four girlfriends in 17 years, I'm not a man who takes the search for a wife to mean "I'll try any girl on for size, and whoever fits, fits." No, I'm looking for something fairly specific, and it has nothing to do with body type, hair color, or how pretty she is when she smiles.

ANYONE who's known me for a few years can tell you that no matter how depressed I got, I kept slogging towards my internship. While I was at MAF, I didn't take a single day off, no matter how depressed I was, during that entire debacle. And no matter how bad my day gets, and every day starts by waking up feeling lonely and wishing I had a family, I have NEVER gone out and tried to pick up a girl to drown my sorrows in. Nor have I ever had a single drop of alcohol, a single joint, or a single cigarette.

I have yet to back down from the challenges I've faced in my adult life. I've been unemployed for long periods of time. I've gotten sick multiple times and been unable to function. I've been homeless. I haven't won all of them, far from it, but every time I get knocked down, I get right back up. And I do it without drinking myself stupid, without the comfort of a wife or girlfriend, without being surrounded people who share my objectives, and without compromising those objectives.

This post is for all the people who tell someone how they should live before they ask how they're doing.

This is for the people who got married right out of college and had several kids, but are experts on being single, celibate, and 30.

This is for the people who drink, smoke, and fuck their pain away, but are experts on being a bipolar man living a Straight Edge lifestyle.

This is for the people who gave up on their dreams, but are experts on being absolutely uncompromising.

This is for the people who have never lived alone, but are experts on being a nomad who's lived in seven cities in four years.

This is for the people who have never spent three years training for something only to have it end in disaster, and then asked for another chance to do it again.

This is for the people who've never stared down the barrel of a gun and called the person holding it "Sir", but are experts on how to be polite in a tense situation.

This is for the people who've never sold their personal possessions to pay the bills while they're overseas doing missions work, but are experts on who and isn't qualified to serve at all.

This is for people who've never dropped everything and taken multiple days off work to help a friend out, but are experts on who is and isn't loving.

This is for people who've never sacrificed their entire way of life on the altar of Faith, and yet are experts on what Faith is.

This is for all the people who know us better than we know ourselves. The armchair generals of life, the people who are better than the rest of us, and are always willing to vomit out their opinion on us whenever we make the mistake of asking them for advice. 

Enjoy.

Applied Anarchism Part 1: Take Care Of Your People.

It's the Fourth of July, and I'm living in Independence, Kansas. The folks around here would probably slice their arms open if you told them they didn't bleed red, white, and blue. It's kinda disturbing, after all they're celebrating their freedom from one type of heavily-authoritative government while they're living firmly under the boot of another type of heavily-authoritative government.

Apparently, a tyranny in which power is inherited is worse than a tyranny in which power is accumulated through lies, manipulation, and cronyism. At least that's what folks would tell you nowadays, that Monarchy is Bad, while Democracy (even though the US is supposed to be a Republic) is Good.

Left Boot, Right Boot, King's Boot, President's Boot...they're always a little too firmly planted on somebody's neck, and the neck never cares what kind of boot it is.

So what's an anarchist to do? How are we ever going to get rid of tyranny?

Actually, it's not as hard as it seems, it's just counter-intuitive.

See, what we need to realize is that tyranny is authorized by those at the top, often thousands of miles away from us, but it's implemented by those who are locally-based. The President is NEVER going to personally kick down my door. Congress will NEVER personally attempt to take my guns from me. No, they'll simply authorize (in an egregious abuse of power) a local thug to do it, and the local thug (utilizing the Nuremberg Defense of "We were just following orders") will do what he's told.

Those at the top justify their tyranny of a country based on very, very local situations, too. It wasn't a nationwide slaughter that led to the latest series of attempts at gun control, it was one kid shooting up a school. It's one city having a huge drug problem that leads to trouble for the rest of the country. Scaling down the problem, it's a bad neighborhood that causes a city to overreact and create a city-wide policy of heavy-handed policing. So that, really, is the first thing we need to fix. Bad neighborhoods, and specifically, the ones we live in now.

Think back to that idealized depiction of the 1950s that we have in America. All the lawns were mowed, all the trees were green, all the houses were well-kept, and everybody knew everybody. The kids had nothing to fear from the adults, just the bully down the street. The husbands were strong family men, the wives were the best of friends with each other, and all the kids were on the same baseball teams, and were in the same class at school.

Ever notice that the cops never really showed up in Leave It To Beaver? How they never doorkicked the neighbors because of suspected drugs, and never prosecuted Eddie Haskell for being a rascal? How the cops in Mayberry carried revolvers, sometimes unloaded?

What would it take to get that back?

Well, if we want that lifestyle back, we have to deal with the problems ourselves. Simply put, an Anarchist is a proponent of self-governance. We take care of our own problems, we don't go running to Big Brother to solve them for us. All that does is keep Big Brother fat, happy, and far too involved in our lives.

So what's a practical step to start with? For starters, we have to get off our couches and get to know our neighbors. And I don't mean "Oh, yeah, Jim and Nadine live to the north of us, while Tyler, Marla, and Robert live in the house to the south. They're nice folks."

No, I mean that we need to actually get to know them. That means spending enough time that we know Jim's entire shift liable to be laid off at the plant, and that Tyler occasionally has to work 16-hour days at his job. That we know which of the local kids is the natural leader, and which of them is the one with good grades. It means we get involved in their lives enough that we're there for them when they need help, every time.

It's not enough to want the government boot to get lighter, or cast votes in that direction. No, to really get rid of it, you have to make it unnecessary, starting with taking care of Your People. That may mean big things, like finding a neighbor a job if he gets laid off, or little things, like feeding the neighbor's kids if they were over playing anyways.

The goal is to have a neighborhood full of people that trust and take care of each other. It doesn't take long for people who are good friends to start dealing each other directly when there's a problem, instead of dealing with the cops. If Sam gets into a fight with my boy Johnny, I'll be more likely to go to Sam's dad to sort it out if we've been friends for five years. If I'm angry and have no idea who Sam's dad is, I would have to deal with the authorities instead.

Then there's a police report, and maybe charges, and what may have been a schoolyard squabble over something stupid turns into a statistic. Sam won't ever make it up to Johnny, and his dad will only know me as the guy who called the cops over a fistfight. That's a lot of bullshit that could have been avoided, when you think about it.

It's a lot like that old Mafia concept of Omerta, really, only with the emphasis placed on friendship instead of vendettas. Instead of talking to the cops, or to any other authorities, we deal with the other person directly. If they need help, we help them directly instead of getting them help. If they need a talking-to, we'll do that directly as well, instead of calling the cops.

Pretty soon, your neighborhood gets marked on the police map as a place that doesn't need patrolled. That's a hell of a good start, isn't it?

But that's just your neighborhood. You want your whole city to change.

Which means that the parents in your neighborhood are going to be well-known (but perhaps not especially well-liked) by the teachers at your kids' schools. When there's a parent-teacher conference, you're all there, and if the teacher's doing stupid shit, you're at the next school board meeting to make sure it doesn't happen again. If there's enough stupid happening, one of the parents in your neighborhood is going to be *on* the school board, with the openly-stated intent of firing people.

It means that you, AND/or the parents in your neighborhood are just as well-known at city council meetings, too. And probably less-liked, because every time the mayor does something stupid, you're there to take him to task. You're at planning & zoning meetings, you're at everything, all the time. You're a busy, busy person.

And right now you're saying "But dude, aren't we anarchists? Why the hell are we dealing with mayors? We need to get rid of the mayors, the cops, everybody with a title and a badge!"

Yeah, and in a perfect world, that would be possible, but we don't live in a perfect world. We live in a nasty world, with lots of idiots. So while we can AND SHOULD do everything we can to make the government unnecessary, like taking care of our people, we also can AND SHOULD be as involved as possible in the local (city and/or county) governments to make sure they A) don't screw up too badly, and B) stay as much out of our affairs as possible.

And here's how the ideal system works:

You're taking care of your neighbors so much that the cops haven't had to deal with anything in your neighborhood for a decade. Your local school has a reputation as a place with good teachers, because you and your buddies got all the bad ones fired. The mayor craps himself when you and yours show up at city council meetings, because you and your buddies are the ones that got the last mayor ousted instead of reelected.

(The local (city and county) governments are the ones that authorize the local PD/Sheriff to get an MRAP from the Feds, after all, and they're the ones that keep the police chief on the payroll. If you and the rest of your good neighbors raise a shitstorm on a biblical scale when the subject first comes up, it won't be a popular move for the local guys, all of whom need LOCAL support to get reelected.)

And your neighborhood watch is the one that has night-vision security cameras and interlocking fields of fire. Your neighborhood is the one that doesn't call the cops, because it's the place where drug dealers are escorted out, the very first time they show up, by a collection of concerned dads wearing plate carriers and carrying rifles. The place where there just happens to be a concerned dad getting some fresh early-morning air every time someone shows up to the "bad" house at 4 AM.

Criminals aren't stupid, they won't hang around a place where they can't hide what it is they're doing. Cops on the clock generally follow criminals, and if a cop happens to move in next door, just convert the bastard as soon as you can, and hide everything you can't trust him with until then.

And while it's true that this isn't a recipe to fix the whole country, what everybody needs to understand is that there *isn't* a recipe for that. We can vote on new guys all day long, but until we fix our neighborhoods, what changes can we actually expect? We'll fix our neighborhoods, and the guys in the next neighborhood over (who're really just neighbors of your neighbor's neighbor), will fix theirs, and when the assholes on the Federal level try to start shit, nobody in the area will want to do their dirty work.

And your local cops don't have military gear, because you and all your good neighbors shut that down at city council meetings.

Your local schools aren't using the federal curriculum, that got shut down at school board meetings. So did the grant money that came along with it, because it had strings attached.

Your mayor isn't part of Mayors Against Guns, because the last one failed to get reelected because of his membership

No, in your neighborhood, people depend on their familes, and on their neighbors, to get through hard times. When the government tries to get involved, the help is politely declined. Even the local thugs know that if they cause trouble, they'll have to deal with the consequences of it, because your neighborhood takes care of each other.

It sounds like a whole lot of hard work, but it also sounds like a much better plan than hoping that doing the same things we've always done will have a different result this time. If you want a nice neighborhood, start there. Worry about some asshole that some other assholes elected another day.

And some day, you'll look around and realize that Big Brother isn't paid any heed in your area, and nobody cares what he says when he's blathering on about something on the television. You'll realize that nobody's running to the feds just because a neighbor did something suspicious, they handled it themselves.

It ain't a perfect solution, but it's not a perfect world, and it's a much better solution than what we're doing now. I'll probably talk more about how the government actually controls folks next, understanding how that works is key to undoing it.