A Few Things I Learned The Hard Way

I'm just old enough now to be considered to have some real life experience, so let's pretend I do. Lemme share with you some things I've learned the hard way over the last decade or so. 

First, there are never enough tears to shed. Crying is not defeat, it's not a sign of weakness, it's not something you really should reserve as a weapon of last resort. Crying is literally one of the tools our mind and body has, whether you believe that is because God gave it to us or because our distant ancestors randomly developed it, to deal with the fact that we are, in fact, finite beings dealing with thoughts and emotions that exist in a near infinite quantity, variety, and intensity. Cry often, if you can. If you have your time to cry when it's safe to do so, you may have the strength to hold back tears when it's not safe. 

Second, sometimes we just can't cry for the "right" things. There are so many tragedies that occur in this world, in our lives, in the news, in countries we've never seen nor ever will, and even in our own back yards. There is a constant barrage of things to cry about, legitimately heartbreaking things, and especially right now, when we seem to be surrounded by horrible things, day in and day out, it's sometimes just too much to cry about; the tears won't come. I have a little trick that I do when I realize that I can't cry about what bothers me now: I go back and cry about things that I cried about before but never really changed. 

In the last decade, I have lost my father, two friends, and a cat that had been in my family, that I'd known, for well over half my life at the time (it's now almost exactly half my life, as she died at age 18, and I'm now 36). On top of that, I lost so much of myself, so much of what I had hoped for. I'm not gonna bore you with a full inventory, but, in my experience, by the time you're an "adult," you've cried enough that you can remember something to cry about. And crying about something old, at least for me, helps me process the emotions of what I feel like I should be crying about today. 

There are tools I use to cry about old things. Songs, sometimes old videos, sometimes random audio files, pictures, etc. If you've known me for a long time, you may know some of these song titles, and you may even know why they break my heart, and despite that, why I still listen to them from time to time:

"Letters from War" 

"His Theme" 

"Christmas Shoes"

"Happy Birthday" (not that one, this one's a rap song)

"Cinderella" 

"Butterfly Kisses" 

Third, the pain of grief doesn't actually go away; you just learn to live with it. That sounds like a bad thing, but in a way, it's like whoever or whatever you lost is still with you, even in their absence. You'll never fully know the size or shape of the hole you'll leave behind in the lives of people who you've affected, hopefully the people you love. But when you lose them, you'll know the exact size, shape, location, depth, and searing pain of the hole they left behind. It's less like a wound that will scar over and eventually heal, and closer to cobblestone; the hole from a missing stone is always there, but you learn to tread carefully around it, until you sometimes just need to sit down next to the hole and remember what was lost, and why it hurts so much to have lost it. 

Finally, pretend to be the person you want to be. This is probably one of the most frustrating and annoying pieces of advice that I've ever gathered, and take it with a massive grain of salt, but if you use it this one way, it can help a lot: when you're in a situation and you're not sure what to do, ask yourself what that person, the person you want to be, would do, and then do it, or as close to it as you can manage without harming yourself or anyone around you. The person I want to be is kind, caring, and willing to help others know they're not alone. Which is why I'm writing all this BS for you to read. 

If you bothered reading all of this, do me one solid favor: sometime within the next day, do something for yourself that you wouldn't have otherwise; give yourself a kindness that you would have otherwise been denied. Doesn't need to be huge, maybe it's just making yourself a cup of tea you haven't had in a long time because drinking the same few flavors for the last month has just gotten too boring, or maybe it's changing into clean, dry clothes when you'd normally just tough it out, or something else equally mundane. Just, do something kind for yourself. I believe that every act of kindness we perform, even for ourselves, brings more kindness into the world, and makes it a tiny bit better than it would have been otherwise as a result. 

Anyway, I've wasted enough of your time for tonight. God Bless if you'll let Him, and have an otherwise great day.

Purely Hypothetical Thoughts About The Civil Liberties We've Been Losing

 This is purely hypothetical, but let's do a thought experiment. 

If you wanted to be able to create a system in which you are allowed to basically put everyone but you and your peers under constant surveillance, and get them to thank you for taking their right to privacy away, how would you do it?

Here's how I'd go about it. First, I'd start undermining any sort of assistance there might be in raising kids. I'd create a mythology that the "nuclear family" should be the only family unit, much like was done to sell suburban homes, which in turn was to sell automobiles. So I'd probably use that.

That would make it so that grandparents and other extended family have little to no role in raising kids without there needing to be conversations about schedules and driving time and other logistical issues that don't really show up in multi-generational housing or in close knit communities.

Then, I'd start to make it harder to get any other support for raising kids. I'd cut funding to schools so that the environment becomes toxic. I'd cut funding to daycare just to make it too expensive to use for most people. I'd make sure that any working parent has to work even more for childcare.

Then, I'd force wages to stagnate, maybe by creating a tax structure and monetary policy that so heavily benefits the hyper-rich that they can literally work people to death and it be viewed as positive. I'd even create a myth that letting them keep more money would cause wealth to trickle down.

With this, I'd make sure that the hyper rich, large equity firms, and foreign corporations have more access to the residential housing market than actual residents, making housing prices so high that it takes an entire full time job to barely cover it with nothing to spare. Why? So they work more.

Having kids would then require you to be working multiple jobs and/or overtime, at least 60 hours a week, and all that time you have to pay someone else to be with your kids or you have to hope they do well in the extremely underfunded public school that you send them to every day. It never ends.

Meanwhile, I'd make sure that my peers, the super rich and powerful, have full access to everything I'm cutting off from the working class; they'd have access to high quality housing, good childcare, and well funded schools, even their public schools as funding could be based on property taxes.

Then, if a new technology came out that allowed people to have their very lives quantified and surveilled constantly, I'd make sure there was a way to heavily monetize that, a way that would be out of reach for the working class except to become middle men in an absolutely broken system.

I'd make sure that the most popular ways to access that technology were addictive, and used tools to actually make your quality of life worse by using them, increasing stress, decreasing access to good information, and flooding users with misinformation constantly so they can never tell what's true.

This is part of where that lack of funding for education gets to play double duty, because since I'd have defunded education except for the rich so much, none of the working class would have ready access to the education necessary (like epistemology) to be able to assess information on their own.

Then, I'd build entire companies that market directly to children but allow unvetted adults onto the platforms, wait for the inevitable and horrific crimes to occur, and then use that to justify getting the government to tie everyone's currently partially anonymous data with their government ID num.

Of course, that would be sacrificing children in the most horrific way possible, but we're looking to build a surveillance state here. I'd set up all these different things that would be the government taking away people's privacy and autonomy and label it all with "think of the children!"

Oh, and I'll have set up a cultural construct that makes parenthood equivalent to godhood, making child abuse ridiculously common in the nation I'm overseeing, so common that it's still part of our cultural media and treated as either humor or justice, punishing bad kids; doesn't need to make sense.

That way, anyone who has education and/or experience raising kids can't tell the parents that they need to parent, because "how dare they tell you how to raise your kids!?" I'd ensure the news covers juvenile crimes heavily, alongside the horrific crimes above, so everyone is scared for and of kids.

Then, I declare that I can fix it all with some new laws. Laws that make it so that you can't buy what you want because kids can't have it; laws that make it so that you have to give your government ID number to corporations to be sold with your data; laws that take away your liberties one by one.

And then I'd do just that. I've already made it so that parents will literally fight and die to support these laws because they never had access to the time or resources to learn that I'm lying to their faces, since none of these laws would address root causes at all. But I'd run into a problem.

See, I might be stuck in a nation that, say, had a court case that enshrined the right to privacy to include freedom from unnecessary search and seizure, but also freedom from government interference with personal choices. I'd need to get that overturned, so I'd get millions to fight for that.

How would I do that? Focus on the wrong part of that court case and turn that into something demonic, sell it to religious leaders who benefit from their "flock" being too undereducated to identify a scam, and spend decades getting the highest court in the land stacked with corrupt judges I control.

Once I get that overturned, I'd have some of my peers in the ruling class make a big deal about how it's all about that wrong part of the court case, and declare that they'll fix it by passing laws that don't actually enshrine the right to privacy, and then they never pass the laws anyway.

See, it's all basic slight of hand just scaled up; I'm making them look in the wrong direction so I can pick their pocket. Make them think the right to privacy only matters about one subject, and then pass laws that revoke their right to privacy when they use that technology I mentioned earlier.

On top of that, any technology that powerful would almost certainly become necessary to daily living, so by passing these laws, like, say, requiring all general use operating systems to store and transmit that government ID data as "age verification" (yeah, a lot of people will buy that).

I might even write the law so that it doesn't technically require government ID, but I'd made it a fine, so that profit-driven companies that might be held liable will be forced by their shareholders to go with the most extreme version just to be safe. I might even coordinate this globally.

And then I just have to wait until enough horrible things are happening at once to quietly pass these laws and rules and regulations that take away freedom without people talking about it, because they're more important things going on, like say, a budding dictatorship in a superpower republic.

But the one thing I would hope no one figures out is that the ruling class are all in on this because that dictatorship needn't be the way they control our lives and work us to death; they can do it through surveillance, restriction of access to resources, and continued toxic fiscal policy.

In short: I'd have built the system and situation that the State of California, theocratic organizations like Collective Shout, government ranging from the UK and former commonwealth nations, the EU, and more are using to sell you that to protect children, they have to own your entire life.

There's a reason I don't want Newsom to be the next Democratic presidential candidate: because he's not progressive; he talks like one, but his policies are that of a neoliberal, which is a form of conservative that figured out that the working class will rise up if conditions get bad enough.

He signed the Digital Age Assurance Act either knowing that the only way developers could meet that requirement and the requirements from Visa/Mastercard, the EU, the UK, and Australia is to integrate government ID systems into the verification and allow that to be tied to user data or blind to it.

Now, I can't say for certain whether or not this conglomeration of a perfect storm to take away privacy and autonomy rights from people all over the world was planned, but I can tell you that the people who benefit from these laws will be able to break them for their own data; it's always a fine.

If a fine is the only punishment for breaking a law, that is a law that applies exclusively to working class people. The ruling class can either use their wealth and influence to avoid being charged in the first place, or pay the meager fine out of their petty cash. The punishment doesn't harm them.

Now, a lot of this is legitimately just coincidence. The myth of the nuclear family used to sell the suburbs and keep people out of multi-generational housing was done well before anyone would have come up with this idea, for instance. Same with the decades-long plan to overturn Roe v Wade.

But it's clear that these laws to "Save the Children" won't affect members of the ruling class, a massive percentage of which clearly were either aware of or participated in Epstein's crimes or similar ones, I think we're being lied to about why they're targeting working class civil liberties.

They're not protecting us, or our children, from the most vile ones, they are the most vile ones. So why are we letting them take away our rights to privacy, autonomy, access to information, and more? 

Because they think we're too ignorant to know better, and what scares me is they might be right.

So I'm doing what I can do, which is point out what I've pointed out here. If you read this far, thank you and I apologize for being so wordy, but that's who I am. 

Try to do something good for yourself today, some kindness you wouldn't otherwise. It literally makes the world a better place.

God Bless if you'll let Him, and have an otherwise great day.