Practice Your Independence
In between listening to Terrance McKenna and watching The Creepy Line this fourth of July, I took some time to reflect on just what it means to be independent…
Wondered what it even means in the face of such powerful and sweeping tools seemingly bent on our enslavement, and our willing and widespread capitulation to them.
I thought of the champions that have fought for this land and for this country and my relatives and ancestry on all the sides.
What it means to own and manage a piece of land…
To be part of and come from this earth.
The weightiness of it all brewing in my brain, I stepped out of the air conditioned home I was sitting in to light a perfectly machine-rolled joint of marijuana.
Wondered if I even had what it would take to be truly independent?
Fuck taxes, healthcare, and roads – we’ve let go the responsibility of some pretty significant aspects of life like procuring our food, building our own shelter, and educating our young.
When ‘the end’ comes, its timing (today), and what it looks like (look around) is going to catch a lot of people by surprise…I don’t think we’re going to be bombed back into the stone-age, necessarily – I think relics of our age will live on far longer than our generation or the next…primitive fire-making is a nice skill to have (especially if you wanna be on TV), but my Bic lighters repeatedly survive my mindlessly putting them through the washing machine.
Incidentally, so do my Apple earbuds.
Drown killer AI with water?
Unlikely, it seems.
There are those on the digital side of a growing divide who believe that humanity’s best hope is a merging with technology capable of solving the ills of our current environmental plight.
Then there are those who still hunt for their own turkey.
Unfortunately, it is seeming less and less like the two sides are reconcilable – especially if you are searching for ways to do so on Google.
The rich get richer and the poor get stimulus checks…
Incidentally, do you want to know why people don’t want fast food jobs even for a whopping $15/hr?
It has nothing to do with being lazy, or collecting unemployment…
It has to do with basic human dignity – the right to work at something meaningful is at threat of being traded for the right to have air-conditioning, internet access, and a high-calorie, diabetes inducing diet.
Robots shouldn’t be making war and dictating the stock market, they should replace demeaning jobs like dispensing corn-based, mono-saturated calories from behind a counter, and twirling the ‘stop’ and ‘slow’ sign on a road construction crew.
The humans freed from such indignity could instead be paid $15/hr to reforest this planet, to clean trash from waterways, to tend gardens grown in publicly watered places.
(Am I starting to sound a bit like Tyler Durden? Don’t tell me if I am, it might violate the first rule of Fight Club.)
Lawns should be willingly abandoned and, when necessary like in Las Vegas, banned outright.
Gardens should be grown while they can.
At the very least we should stop spending millions on Chinese-made fireworks to blow them up in some pathetic pantomime of glory and battle for fucks’sakes.
Look up what it does to the birds and the bees.
At least limit public funding of them until no child goes to bed hungry in this country…
(Now I sound like a communist.)
In reality, I’m a-political.
Which is more like being pansexual than asexual.
Look it up on Duck Duck Go, if you will…
I realize that at the end of the day, the CEO’s of Google and Facebook and Lockheed Martin and the Presidents of either party or the crack-pots and militias all have one thing in common…
Everyone believes in the righteousness of their respective causes.
They all do what they do out of an absolute faith in the absolute fact that what they are doing is in the best interest of those they rule, govern, control and coerce.
Really, I’m an anarchist…
Anarchy gets a bad name… A misrepresentation.
A vision of lawless looters stalking from house to house has been embedded deep within us.
Without the state governing us, we would certainly devolve into the lowest, most base form of debauchery and chaos…
False.
But Anarchy does not mean chaos…it means taking responsibility for yourself, for your community.
It also doesn’t belong on the political spectrum, as it is – by definition – a lack of body politic.
I try to love all people regardless of race or creed or political bent…at least, as long as I’m attracted to them.
Seriously though, something’s gone off the rails in the corporatocracy in which we live…
“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time,” Thomas Jefferson once wrote, “with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”
The tree, unfortunately, has gone far too long without water… instead its been oiled, enriched, and clear-cut.
I wonder which side of the digital divide we would prefer to reside on if we knew the myriad undemocratic ways we are manipulated moment to moment, if the costs were stacked up clearly weighed against the minimal loss of the convenience/annoyance of being reachable at every moment…
“Really?” George Washington, or my Cherokee brethren might reasonably ask, “You gave up everything for a cell phone?!”
Would you rather dig in clean dirt, grateful for every morsel that emerges from it, or pick through the trash cast-off from the techno towers that generate disgraceful amounts of wealth for the very few at the continuous and evolving expense of the many?
We live in a police state with the highest level of citizenry incarceration on the planet in the history of the planet.
And why haven’t ALL past non-violent marijuana offenders in Colorado been released from prison?
Police forces were created to track down escaped slaves. And they are maintained to keep us enslaved.
They should be abolished as unjust and unnecessary – let the rich fund their own private security should they wish.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not advocating for defunding the police – that’s asinine.
I’m arguing for defunding the Federal and State Government.
Both, if deemed necessary could be run with an annual Go Fund Me that dictates their budget for the coming year, or sold in shares for those willing to invest in their shoddy business practices, receiving a return at the end of the year.
Government is the only business habitually running at a loss, coercing (nay!) forcing the investment of its shareholders, that NEVER pays a residual.
It should be called to task and made to answer for its crimes.
Blacks should be given 40 acres and a mule and so should my people…ALL my people. Black, white, red, brown, Indian, Native, Asian… if you’re an American, you should be given the periodic choice of whether or not you submit to being ruled.
Not continuously fooled into thinking that casting a ballot between two scoundrels makes a difference.
Perhaps this vote of confidence could occur every 4th of July?
Be an appropriate way to mark the day.
But, I’ve obviously gone off the rails…
If you’re not ready to not pay your taxes, consider taking back your health and wellness…watch Heal on Amazon (I watched that while the fireworks fell too), or do this Healing Meditation – either way, and by whatever way start to reclaim the right and responsibility for the authorship of your life.
Practice your independence.
The physical practice of yoga was created in a contemporary setting that called for individuals to have enough self-discipline to ready themselves to confront whatever incarnation of tyranny reared its head next be it state-based, corporate controlled, or technologically delivered.
Don’t skip the push-ups – we may need them…and don’t neglect a meditation practice we definitely need it.
It’s time to rededicate ourselves to the practice of our own independence, to reconsider the strategic appeal of the analogue.
Time to get our hands dirty, Outlaws…
~JK
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Justin “Jud” Kaliszewski is the best-selling yoga teacher and renowned creator of Outlaw Yoga. Author. Artist. Adventurer. Take his class NOW at outlawyogaclub.com and www.youtube.com/outlawyoga. Find his writing and art at www.justinkaliszewski.com and his presence all over the internet – for an outlaw, he’s shockingly easy to get ahold of.