A Perfect Circle - Imagine

yup

answers are for assholes

Masticating the manic minds of millions is no easy task, but its the one I set down for myself, so in this madness I gladly bask. As I progress in my study of this globe and species to which I belong it's becoming abundantly clear my indulgence in learning produces envy in others and lunacy within. The solutions to our rampaging sadistic species does not lie with books or in the four walled prisons we have built to hide from nature. Why play these obsessive games with our precious days when the brilliant sun and resplendent earth so emphatically point the way? Many people walk through life weighed down by centuries of cultural baggage that does nothing more than slow our journey and comfort the cries of 'are we there yet?'. What I propose is that every step we take further down the road of materialism and so called progress the less human we are. I hear the echoes of ages past resounding with blood drenched glory and insatiable passion. These days appear far different when compared with them. Today it all appears to cruelly calculated and carefully crafted that our society resembles a machine more than a group of human beings. People are programmed, processed, then placed, placated and then they pass. All this comes from but one place- the dreams we dream. Captains of Industry dreamt up forests of buildings, rivers of cars, herds of workers, and now here we are living that dream. If an individual dreams it is usually called art or insanity, but when groups dream, it is called power. The most powerful force to fight the mind numbing indulgence of our age is something we do every night when we sleep. If only the exploited masses and mislead middleman could be made to understand that all they need do is conceive of a path, then walk down it. So here we sit, a convict with the key to the cell, but not the courage to use it. However, I do feel a slight change in the wind. Perhaps the endless years of greed will soon give way to a whole new approach to life based on understanding and alturism. I hope that such is the case, but without dreamers, and lots of them, such things will never come to pass.

Can't lose what you never had

“Man is tormented by no greater anxiety than to find someone quickly to whom he can hand over that great gift of freedom with which the ill-fated creature is born.” -Fyodor Dostoevsky
Freedom is one word that in this country has been effectively hollowed out, filled with stuffing, embalmed and then put upon a shelf as though it were a trophy. The modern American is bred to be selfishly subservient and myopically materialistic, freedom doesn't factor into it at all. Some people seem to think of freedom as a fad started during the Age of Enlightenment that went out of fashion and was replaced by the monolithic might of the modern State. Perhaps that is exactly how it went down and when freedom wasn't en vogue anymore we simply kept the word because it had a good ring to it and it was already in our national anthem. In the new world we are all too codependent to be literally free, but we have a piece of paper called the Bill of Rights that makes us hypothetically free. To be perfectly honest, I have no fucking clue what the word freedom means to the English speaking world. I'm sure in the olden days freedom meant not having some other ethnic group dominate you and your people. Then in the not so olden days it was a metaphysical concept that said you were only free if you live in a representative democracy in which you possess certain inalienable rights. But today it seems to have assumed the characteristics of a mantra with a mystical meaning that questioning is treacherous. I tend to agree with the statement that freedom, if it isn't universal, is just privilege extended. Deep down on some subconscious plain I suspect this is what they all mean by freedom. We dominate other regions and are given certain privileges in return for our support of said domination. This would be supported by the fact that our global campaign to root out opposition and test loyalties is called Operation Enduring Freedom. I'm probably wasting my time trying to make any sense of the average Americans mindset. In my personal opinion freedom is a fundamentally spiritual thing that allows people to no longer be tethered by fear and necessity to what we know in our hearts to be wrong. A nation cannot be free just because they say they are, and that is essentially what we are doing.