Perhaps from now on, when I’m tempted to go off on a rant, I’ll just stop myself and point you back here.

We should both be so lucky, no?

“The unelected empire managers who actually run the US power structure also don’t care who wins the election.

They know they’ll still get their murder and militarism and capitalism and imperialism no matter who gets sworn in next year, whether it’s Biden or Trump or Harris or someone else.

Nobody with any real power cares about your vote.

***

Too many people have been successfully propagandized into believing the status quo works and their government is basically good, or successfully manipulated into giving up on politics altogether and throwing their attention into other things.

Before the people can begin using the power of their numbers to force real change, they’re going to have to be awakened to the reality that everything they’ve been told about their government, their society and their world is a lie.

They’ve got to come to the understanding that the mainstream news media are nothing but propaganda and they live under the most murderous and tyrannical regime on this planet.

They’ve got to realize that this power structure does not ultimately serve their interests, or the interests of their fellow human beings around the world.”

https://substack.com/@caitlinjohnstone

***

When I do rant, all too often … I’m really just pleading with you to ask yourself with complete honesty whether “too many people have been successfully propagandized” might possibly, theoretically, by any long stretch of the imagination … apply to you.

If not, well okay I guess–nothing really left to say.

It applied to me for a long time and in some visceral ways it still does.

Part of why I write about this stuff is because I’m trying to wake myself the fuck up, too.

***

I wrote that one coming back up out of a quick black depression, 24 hours worth, Sunday night until Monday night. I’m adding this part very early on Trash Day, after sleeping it off more or less succesfully.

There were three things that sent me crashing down from the great high of the Hidden Cove walk, and the first of the three was editing the video of the walk itself.

As I pieced it together, I wasn’t happy with myself, and in particular with the way I relate (and have always related) to this society. In taking that long, long walk into the depths of the local outback, I should have found a perfected form of Sanctuary.

What I found instead was quite shocking, and I related to it badly, on film.

I found the Interpretive Sign, and the awkward benches completely out of place, locked up where no one was supposed to see them, but I was seeing them illegally anyway.

I was angry … that so much of our collective money and effort had been expended way out there, and that so much additional effort had been expended in making sure that almost no one is being legitimately allowed to enjoy the result.

But instead of feeling my own anger, the righteousness of it, or doing anything about it, I was only concerned with whether I was going to get in any kind of trouble (and that was cowardly, lion).

It was a much more serious and consequential version of the same paranoia I had felt over the asphalt thing. I’m still processing it.

The second reason was a long conversation with my brother, a conversation mostly about the state of my marriage, which is tragic and wrong.

The third thing … the boxes … as I start to finally unpack them, start to sort them …

The new sense of the house as open and airy and free starts to crumble, at least temporarily. I start to feel hemmed in again by Stuff, but this time it’s my own stuff, and I don’t have any else to blame for how much of it there is or that I don’t easily have useful places to put it all.

I know that’s pretty abstract.

(I have for example, three very old, very nice sleeping bags. I have used exactly one of them, exactly once, in twenty years. I have them but I don’t have a sense of where they fit in or how they belong to me do you see? Does it matter? Do they matter? Do I matter?)

Somehow I’m thinking of the old saw about revolutions; that they don’t occur when things are really bad. They occur precisely when things are getting rapidly better, and people feel a rush of delayed hope coming out and being expressed too fast for comfort, or rationality.

I just kept working the best I could, and toward the end of last night I walked out to check the mail, and of course the envelope with the special government code that is supposed to solve everything was sitting there, like an omen.

I went straight to their site and entered it in the proper place. They had a long list of questions for me.

The only one that was hard to answer was: When did you get married?

I put down that it happened on my anniversary date, which I do approximately know, in 2016. (So yes it’s the end of May, and in ’16 as best as I can calculate, and the question turns out to not matter anyway, because I’m not applying for a spousal benefit.)

But I’m only three-quarters sure that this was the exact truth.

Somewhere in yet another still-unpacked box there is a paper that gives the date definitively, alongside massive expensive piles of unlooked-at photographs …

I felt dread, at the thought of unpacking the one before that, and that box itself, and the one after that.

I will do it anyway. In my own good time, and manner. Will it help?

Perhaps, perhaps, perrr haps.

Now there is dawn from the darkness, and a thing we call a Tuesday begins.

The particular cat named Riley is feeling needy, as he has for many weeks now.

Yet on the bright side, he has learned to purr easily and often.

I should like to get him to teach me.