Join or Die
Freedom earned must be freedom used, or it will be freedom lost. This isn’t a quaint saying by some long-dead philosopher. It’s just the way I see it. I used to run cross-country in high-school, but too. many years later, I can probably run two miles, but not five without some re-training. Every year I stay out of practice is a year that I get worse at it. So it’s clear to me that if I don’t use my freedoms, I’m likely to lose them without anyone else having to do anything at all.
But losing rights is so much worse than that, and it’s super sketchy how rights are stolen away. For one thing, your right to vote. I’m not talking about the rules regarding who shows up at the voter’s box. I’m talking about your right to vote for your own best interest. How can you be expected to vote for your own best outcome if you can’t even tell which issues are being discussed by the candidates? Yaay! Thanks, Citizen’s United. Notice how nobody’s talking about fixing that anymore?
You’re also losing your right to speak, did you know that? Oh nobody’s going to tell you that you have no right to speak in the marketplace of ideas that is our public, but have you tried to get your voice heard? That’s a near impossibility when you’ve got commercial gatekeepers shouting you down, with more money than you’ll earn in a lifetime. You have the right to speech in very small ways, like to your neighbor, I guess. But you’ll never be on a level playing field with a Super PAC, will you? Not by yourself.
Think about what that means. Nowadays, every corporation worth anything has their own Super PAC. Elon Musk has one. Do you? Didn’t think so.
Join or Die might seem like an exaggeration, but think about what just happened in November. Your voice was not heard, was it? No. I mean, how could it have been? I’m sure you had your venting session with your friends, but did you place your thumb on the scale of a national election? Most likely not. This irritates the hell out of me.
Because in my simplistic view, a government made up of people who are lying to the people, and using their money to sway the media to become even more powerful—how do you control someone who has the money to change everything you see and hear? You don’t. That means for practical matters, you don’t have a voice. How can you?
And once your right to speak is gone, well…everything else just goes too, doesn’t it? How can you petition for holidays if someone else can paint anyone taking holidays as “lazy”? When someone else calls you selfish for wanting a living wage? How can you work to feed your family when someone has painted you a criminal just for wanting a better life for them? No, I’m not talking about immigrants. I’m talking about you. You may not be a criminal yet, but have you heard that there’s an “enemy within” in the United States?
I may miss some things, but I’m reasonably sure that if someone’s going to say there’s an enemy within, and they control how you’re perceived, and you go up against them…you’ll eventually winde up “the enemy.” That’s kind of the whole point, if you ask me.
So join or die. I mean, really. Get your voice back, and join it to the voice of your neighbor. I mean it. Do it now. Find a group to grow your voice because shouting into the void is a waste of time and hurts your throat.
About the expression “Join or Die”:
During the formation of our nation, the battle for America was fought between many warring powers, and there was massive internal unrest as alliances were made and broken between English, French, Spanish and indigenous tribes. Fighting among these powers meant unending bloodshed on American soil. As individual, separate states, the colonies were at the mercy of external forces, who used any means to keep the colonies subjugated, including misinformation and manipulation. It was Benjamin Franklin who printed “Join or Die” as depicted in this PBS link. The meaning was that the colonies either come together and get out from under the thumb of the superpowers of the day, or to some extent literally, die, but also fail at self-governance and die in a metaphorical way.
I stole this quote because I think it’s apt today. I believe that we are being played as a people, by internal forces such as our corporate manipulators, and external forces like Russia and China. The domain may be different, but the battle is for an American Ideology that is in jeopardy. In this context, we either come together, or the American experiment ends in failure. I believe the American people, like you, are way smarter than many would like to convince us that we are. By working together, we can do more than send a message. By working together, we can take our country back.
