The Land of the Free, Not of the We

I am not a team player, except when I am. I hate teams, except when I don’t. I am neither a liberal nor a conservative, except when I’m a democrat or a republican. I’m just me, flawed and faceted and independent. However, in a nation built on the very idea of independence itself, one which was forged in the insurrectionary crucible of the elegant and dangerous idea that all men are created equal and free, I am a minority. I grew up in public schools and pledged daily allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands. However, as the days of my youth slipped by into the long and disillusioned years of my life, I began to understand one simple truth. I discovered that I was pledging my allegiance not to a flag or to a nation, but to an idea – to the simple and seditious belief in unregimented sovereignty over oneself. It is an idea as old as the Continental Congress, but it has been too long neglected and forgotten, retired to the dark and cobwebbed corners of the national attic.

Sequestered there alone and lonely, people pay it lip service, but rarely have the courage of their convictions to support the menacing pitfalls inherit in the very concept of individual freedom. Freedom. People keep on using that word, but I do not think it means what they think it means.

The field of freedom is a dangerous and scary place, a vast open plain littered with mines and trip-wires and booby traps. It is a place littered with the rotting corpses of the timid, and should be visited neither by children nor those with childlike minds, who would quickly find themselves ensnared in one of the horrors of its many hazards, cut off from the herd and bleeding to death. Freedom is a hideous and terrible concept, rife with peril and framed by disaster. It is also, in a word, effulgent.

I hope you looked that up before moving on to this paragraph, because effulgent probably doesn’t mean what you think it means. So, before you go any further, ignore the red herrings of the context clues and take a second to click on the handily hyperlinked word. Then, come back after you’ve received your micro-education for the day, and we’ll continue. It’s ok. I’ll wait…

Freedom is glorious. Resplendent. Shiny. It is the beacon that beckons from atop the tallest tower in the shining city on the hill, the city upon which the world sets its critical and envious gaze. Freedom and liberty built this country, erected over the granite bedrock of concepts like self-reliance, self-determination, and self-governance. It recognized the power of a mind freed from the tyranny of regulation and the oppression of charity. All men are created equal – but only created, mind you. Not raised. Birthed as human, every last one of us emerges from the womb a clean slate. Tabula rasa. A story yet unwritten.

Full of potential and not yet burdened by the shackles of mundanity, babies travel wide-eyed and free through their early years, living their days in a world of imagination, wonder and possibility. A child will test boundaries and push the envelope of acceptable behavior. Kids are precocious and ravenous beasts with insatiable appetites, who claw and bite and tear at the conventions of polite society that enslave the grown-up world. Left to their own devices, children would set fire to the world to watch it burn, then stand there crying amidst the wreckage. Knee-deep in ash and cinder and with no one left to save them, they would cry there and wail there and sob there until, one by one, they would die there. The torrent of their tears slowed to a trickle and then silenced altogether as every last murderous little infant is hushed upon the sharpened scythe of a merciless death. And then, the world turns. The system rights itself, the tanks are flushed, the computer is rebooted and humanity rises Phoenix-like from the ashes to try again, just one more time. Try to get it right this time, this one last time…

A couple hundred years and some change ago, a handful of seditious bastards tried to get it right. They decided to leverage personal freedom against personal responsibility, to amalgamate the strength of the adult with the rebellious passion of the child. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Equality. Justice. Freedom. The inflammatory rule of the mob tempered by the slow moving wisdom of a representative government, where majority rules – but only slowly, and only sometimes. The United States of America, the great experiment in democracy that began 2,519 years ago in Athens, declared its independence in 1776, was recognized as sovereign by Great Britain in 1783, and whose Constitution was ratified in 1789. This puts our country somewhere around 220 to 233 years old, depending on your point of view.

In that short time, the destructive power of freedom has led us to visit unimaginable horrors and inflict untold suffering upon various peoples throughout our history. In a genocidal thrust westward to realize the dream of manifest destiny, we very nearly eradicated the total native population of the continent. We enslaved an entire ethnic group on the basis of skin tone and justified it with a Biblical passage from Genesis, where Noah gets drunk and then goes apeshit with the cursing after he finds out that his son walked into his tent to find him passed out and lying there butt-naked. God had just wiped out every living thing on the planet (except for maybe the fish) in the Great Flood, but decided to save Noah, along with his family and a bunch of animals that Noah coaxed into climbing aboard an ark in twosies, twosies. After the flood waters recede and the Noah clan is once again on terra firma, Noah wanders off into a vineyard and gets piss drunk on cheap wine. Later, after he passes out in his tent and his son Ham walks in to find his daddy lying there with his 600-year-old peepee uncovered, Noah freaks out and curses his grandson Canaan (Ham’s son) to forever be the lowest of slaves to his brothers. And, since medieval Christian scholars decided that Ham founded the population of Africa, the institution of slavery in this country was justified by the Biblical story of Noah getting hammered and then cursing his innocent grandson with eternal servitude because his own son saw him drunk and nekkid. Trailer Park Stories, circa 2300 BC.

Freedom isn’t all bad, however. In truth, freedom is a powerful idea that can create wonder just as easily as it promotes horror. The choice of which path the country will take is, naturally, left to the people of the nation. The individual’s right to vote, to dissent, and to protest is equaled by the individual’s right to apathy, lethargy, and supine acquiescence. A free and democratic republic is only what its citizenry makes of it, for good or for bad. The burden of the success or the failure of the collected whole is placed squarely upon the shoulders of the individual. Of each and every citizen. Me. You. Him. Her. Everyone together, everyone separate. A team made up of independent players, all thinking for themselves and pursuing their own agendas. Americans.

I believe in the freedom and responsibility of the individual, not the collective. My United States of America is made up of fifty separate states working together in a cooperative union, all represented by officials elected to represent the hopes and dreams along with the fears and nightmares of their constituents. The constituents choose to vote for these officials based on the belief that their representatives will speak on their behalf, in their interests. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. When it doesn’t, then the citizenry is heard at the next election cycle, when the failed representative is ousted and replaced by a new candidate. At least, that’s how it’s supposed to work, anyway. Democracy requires an educated populace to function as intended. Ignorance and apathy are the death knells of a democratic government, paving the way for corruption, abuse, and unfettered power for a select few at the expense of everyone else. And, in today’s media-saturated culture, apathy is a commodity peddled by the glowering phosphors of the televised town criers, and they ply the vox populi with promises of fame and phantom wealth. The lie of the American Dream.

How did we get this way? How did we go from a country filled with a populace fueled by independent thought and a ferocity of spirit, to a society of Us vs. Them, where everyone chooses a side and hates the other team for mercurial reasons told to us by the blinking lights of the idiot box? I’m no expert, but I think it has a lot to do with our obsessive team spirit.

From the cradle to the grave, we are taught the benefits of the Team. We’re told to share, to fit in, to join the group. We’re raised to glorify sports played by teams opposing other teams who we’re taught to hate because of the color of their jerseys. We go to work and endure team building exercises sponsored by some corporate wank who travels the country shilling his or her useless and pedantic tripe of conformity to the unwitting drones planted in board rooms and auditoriums by their corporate masters, their eyes figuratively prised open like a theater full of Alex DeLarges enduring a groupthink application of the Ludovico technique. The talking heads on the boob toob tell us which political team we’re on, and why we should hate the other one. Groupthink negates critical thought and dispels individual independence. We rely on the teams we play for and root for, crediting them with our success and blaming them for our failures. The team provides everything: every bonus, every excuse, every positive, negative, up, down, inside, outside, leftside, rightside, nearside and farside of our entire existence, from burping cloth to funeral march. It’s Us vs. Them, we’re all in this together, united we stand, divided we fall. And it’s all bullshit.

“The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.”
– Terry Pratchett

There may be no ‘i’ in team, but there damn sure is an ‘m’ and an ‘e’. America was built on the backs of individuals, on the merits and weaknesses of important men and brave women. Wrongs were righted by the tenacity and unflinching resolve of far-thinking and ambitious leaders, successes made and failures blamed on them and them alone. Buying into the team mentality reduces us to the level of the insect hivemind. Incapable of surviving on our own, we seek shelter amongst the collective inside the comfortable echo chambers of our like-minded Facebook friends, and we think whatever the groupthink tells us to think. We stand on the right and yell at the left to support our President in a time of war, that the office commands respect, regardless of your politics – until, of course, the left gets their man in the big chair. Then, it’s nothing to do with respecting a wartime President or with the sanctity of the office, and it’s all about buzzwords and talking points lactated directly into our salivating mouths from the jiggling, gyrating bounce of the glowing glass teat. The right cries Patriotism when their guy is in office, while the left yells about Fascism. Then, when the left has their man in the white house (especially if he’s black), the right starts screaming Socialism while the left defends the same policies it used to crusade against. It’s all about perspective, all about knowledge, all about critical thought – and nobody seems to have any of it, anymore.

So I stand aside, off to the corner of the room and mingling with the one or two other like-minded masochists who insist on repelling the unwanted advances of a seductive and uncaring media. I stand with those who are thinking for themselves, who are liberal when it comes to things they want to be liberal about, and conservative when they want to be conservatives. I stand with those who stand apart from the team, who do not put on flashy red noses and join in the reindeer games of fools. I tell myself what I like and what I don’t like, what I want or don’t want, and what I need and don’t need. I praise individual achievement and laugh at the passions of beer bellied and barcalounging quarterbacks, who yell in their living rooms on Monday nights and threaten their televisions with Cheetos-encrusted fists. I’m drawn to sports and activities where the credit for success or the burden of failure is given to one person, and one person alone.

Learn. Think. Grow. Learn the facts of the world and think your own thoughts on them, then grow from the experience. The wonder or the horror your life becomes is your choice. The team will think for you and tell you what it wants you to learn. It will lie to you and manipulate you and confuse you, even as it drags you deeper and deeper and deeper into the wet and sticky coldness of its inescapable cave. Being a team player means sacrificing your capacity for critical thought, for righteous dissent, and for true, unbridled freedom. Freedom to say what you want, regardless of whatever offense others may take to it. They, in turn, have the right to offend you. The right, and the obligation. We must struggle to grow, we must endure suffering to strengthen, and we must triumph over fear to ascend to greatness.

I stand alone. I fall alone. Always, the responsibility is mine. And yours. Don’t forget that. We’re all in this together, after all…

Want some books? 'Course ya do!

NOTE:  I know times are hard and yeah, I need to make a living too, but if you want to read any of my books but can't afford to buy them right now, hit me up.

I'll take care of it.

Humor | Nonfiction
Available now from the following retailers

Have you ever lived through an experience that was so humiliating that you wanted to die, but when you tell it to all your friends, they can't stop laughing?

Have you ever made a decision that seemed like a good idea at the time, but you're still living with the hilarious consequences years later?

If so, then grab a snack, get comfortable, and prepare to have all of your own poor life choices seem just a little bit more bearable.

You're welcome.

Short Stories
Available now from the following retailers

The nine stories of rage and sadness collected here range from the most intimate of human experiences to the wildest realms of magic and fantasy. The first story is a violent gut-punch to the soul, and the rest of them just hit harder from there.

Those who tough it out will find a book filled with as much hope as despair, a constant contradiction pulling you from one extreme to another.

Life might knock us down, over and over, and will the beat the ever-loving snot out of us from the time we're old enough to give it attitude until the day we finally let it win and stop getting up.

Always get back up.

Gaming | Nonfiction
Available now from the following retailers

This isn't just a book. It's a portal to other worlds where there be magic and dragons and hilarious pirates. Okay, not really. But this book is about those portals, except they're called video games.

The Life Bytes series of books take a deep dive into one man's personal journey through childhood into kinda/sorta being a responsible, competent adult as told through the magical lens of whatever video games he was playing at the time.

Part One starts way back in 1975 and meanders down various digital pathways until, oh, around about 1993 or so.

If you're feeling nostalgic for the early days of gaming or if you just want to understand why the gamer in your life loves this hobby so much, take a seat in your favorite comfy chair and crack this bad boy open.

I'll try to not be boring.

Horror
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What you are about to read is not a story. There is no beginning, middle, or end.

What follows is nothing more than a series of journal entries involving shadow people, sleep paralysis, and crippling fear. It’s not pretty, it doesn’t follow story logic, and nothing works out well in the end.

You've been warned.