A week or so ago in an email, I mentioned to Mom that I'm an anarchist. I don't remember exactly what she emailed back in response, but part of it was an implication that because I'm on disability and food stamps, that this made me a hypocrite. I'm still pondering whether or not to respond to her, but the following is the majority of a letter I've written out in case I decide to let her know my position better (slightly edited to remove private information):
Think of it this way: if a slave is well fed by its master, is it hypocrisy for the slave to still want to be free? I don't think so. Even if the master is a kind one, and cares for slaves that can't work, slavery is still slavery. I'm opposed to the system, and that's because it squashes free thought and creativity when it can, and undervalues those things when it can't. One of the many reasons I did poorly in school was because I saw through the charade. Memorizing "facts" and figures is memorization, NOT learning. The educational system in this country is part of the larger system.
My friend Brooke told me an interesting tale, once. Back in the early days of the cold war, the government tried an experiment in schools, of teaching kids how to recognize communist propaganda. However, this requires critical thinking skills, and good little worker zombies can't have those. Proof of that was soon evident: the students started being able to recognize the US's propaganda, too. As soon as that was evident, they shut the whole thing down. Now tell me, does that sound like the action of a country "by the people, for the people," or does it sound like slave masters realizing they'd made a mistake.
Further, anarchism and anarchy are not the same thing. Anarchism is freedom. Anarchy is chaos. Anarchism says "Hey, this system is turning most people into mindless zombies and pissing on the people who aren't. Maybe we should abolish the system, find a way to live peacefully and freely, so the next generations are actual people and not zombies." I mean look at it; we call this country a democracy, but not only was it never intended to be a democracy (the founding fathers knew democracy was at least as bad as any other system, but they thought they could reform it, control it. They were wrong). And now almost half the country voted for a man with more money than the last 8 presidents combined, who thinks women should remain barefoot and pregnant, who thinks the Puritans were too liberal, and ran every business he owned into the ground. For anyone paying attention, anyone with free thought, that was a terrifying near miss. Further, can it really be a democracy when there's only two parties, and the two parties have more in common with each other than they have differences? The Democrats, the liberal and supposedly peace-loving Democrats, have been bombing civilian targets with unmanned drones, are still holding people both guilty and innocent in Guantanamo Bay for
indefinite periods of time, passing bills that make the Patriot Act look cuddly, and dozens of other terrible things. There are no strong third parties, and the number of people who aren't voting at all keeps climbing because they've lost hope that voting makes any difference. To be honest, I see their point. Life under Obama isn't much better than life under Bush was, especially for those of us who are paying attention to political issues. So the Democrats are a little nicer to the citizens of the US... well, they're still bombing the crap out of about a dozen different countries, killing innocent civilians. Did you know that this country has been in one war or another for almost the entire time we've been a country? I think the figure is something like "228 years of war and the US is only about 250 years old."
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