They wouldn’t let you play ball on major highways when you were a little kid. When you went to school they required it of you. “Here are the rules, you must follow them until you die. Everyone does it, you will too.”
Almost everyone does it. Some children of powerful families are sent to prep schools where they learn very different lessons. “Our world is creating armies of meat legionaries, willing to die for any cause you can invent. You don’t have to create it, just make lots of promises and token advances. Blame someone else for set backs. Hold the reigns of power and drive your legion for your own benefit. If a mere human asks why; marginalize, drug, or eliminate them. It’s your world — to the winner will go all the spoils. The meat will be consumed as always.”
Perhaps you’ve been playing ball by their rules, “Keep your eye on the ball. Sit on the bench until I tell you to play. Play your position.”
Turn your back, walk away from the rigged game and other people’s self-indulgent rules.
What do you want to do? Have you noticed that question is being asked less and less? Now you are more frequently being told what to do, or at best being given a choice between two unpleasant options. The open ended question without conditions is something from your past. The change has been so slowly insidious that we’ve not noticed. We have arrived on the freeway unaware, and we are soon to die playing someone else’s game. It is not an accident.
It is your life. Choice is still almost infinite despite official questionnaires that requires you to choose (A) or (B). It would be nice to pretend that choice is yours. Where you are playing no longer allows you the dignity of refusal. You will have to go someplace else where there is no standard to carry, a place to reflect and resolve. Home is the place you no longer belong.
Accept it. They have been moving away from you all of your life. We once knew our countries. Now we are told that they must make decisions about us without our knowledge and that may be detrimental to us — and we see the few profit in their hidden ways.
It’s time to leave. With our governments getting more distant and their decisions more callous, our future is more tenuous.
You don’t have to leave yet, but you need to travel. The different natures of governments in different stages of development will reveal the cycles of man. Spot where your birth country is in it’s cycle and compare the known consequences with similar societies in the past.
Once you travel to real places and taste of their societies you will discover that Spring is a choice, Summer a pleasure, Autumn a warning, and Winter may be approaching. Go someplace where spring is well advanced, and settle down. Seek a place where severe governance storms won’t happen till autumn wanes. That might take many generations, even centuries. You’ve not been encouraged to think centuries, only until the next raise.
If you wait as Fimbulwinter intensifies you will never make it through the pass to a more pleasant world. Already your mind and body are adapted to a chill that would have made a more pleasant clime imperative a few seasons ago. Your country is drifting into a snow bank, and you are quietly drifting with them.
Escape. Travel. Open an offshore bank account or two, take some long vacations, buy some foreign land. Don’t say you can’t afford it. What you can’t afford is to stay where you are until your feet are frozen to the earth. The long storms of sustained winter are starting to howl.
I’ve mixed some metaphors here because both are happening, and reinforcing each other — dragging you along. Let’s end where we started.
You have the choices to get off the freeways (examine the original restrictive rules and recently evolving changes to them) and move away from permanent winter (travel and establish expat residencies, PT citizenships, and acquire a second passport).
Play ball where rules are fair, safe, and fun.
Do you feel the chill?
Bill Freeman