The Long Game

A Political Roadmap Back To Freedom

photo by Jaime Lee Colyer

Way back in 2008, I was radicalized by some folks who were in my life and the movie Zeitgeist. I was ripe for the picking, though. I had watched the Twin Towers fall back in 2001 as the icing on an already very hard cake of a year. After which, I went down the rabbit hole with Noam Chompksy’s book on the subject, as well as watching numerous films and interviews with folks who presented pretty convincing arguments that there was more to the story than met the eye. Growing up in a family that was heavily steeped in its love for both history and politics, having an understanding that empires rise and fall through conspiracy, and having a healthy distrust of the American government since the Reagan administration took office early in my youth, it was no great leap to believe that we were all being lied to for greater political gain of a certain few. So, it was no great leap to believe that the Bush administration, at least some of them, had known about these plans, and then let them happen. It was also very apparent that there were shenanigans running amok (building seven being “pulled”) that we The Plebes weren’t privy to. Frankly, these are things I still believe with my whole heart. I have seen the evidence. No one has effectively been able to either contradict, nor explain it away, and I believe that this is one of the arenas that has led to this shit storm with our current government.

When we the public cannot be trusted by Mommy and Daddy leaders on things that we can clearly see issues with, distrust is allowed to fester. Lo and behold, down the line we end up believing nothing but our own fantasies. If you have ever lived through an interpersonal relationship where one member is chronically lying and/or cheating, then you know how that goes. Of course that would also play out on a larger scale.

Take, for instance, vaccines. Humans have been asked to receive an ever increasing number of vaccinations, starting at a very young age. The pure data on efficacy and potential harm is not transparent or upfront. When we ask our doctors, we are told not to worry, that no harm can come from them. Basically, we are placated and treated as ignorant children, at best.

When I brought my concerns to my highly accomplished pediatrician when my daughter was just mere months old, she had no studies to send me to look over for myself. I was treated like just another crazy granola mom. Yet, we do know that complications can arise. Even table salt is linked to around 10,000 deaths per year in North America alone. There is always a risk, with anything. Nothing is ever 100% innocuous. When I brought up concerns about long-term consequences, generational consequences, and potential compound consequences, instead of being led to the studies to show me actual data for me to make up my own mind on the matter and weigh the cost benefit analysis for myself, my concerns were poo-pooed and placated. I was treated like an idiot or a child incapable of discerning for myself the dangers versus the benefits to both self and group, or so it felt.

We laugh collectively at those who would “do their own research”, but is it any wonder that we do? Time and time again, humans will rise to the level of expectation. If we are treated like idiots, then we will act like idiots. Perhaps the answer then is to treat us as inherently intelligent beings and provide more information, not less. Teach us about confirmation bias, and how to spot it in ourselves. Teach us how to spot propaganda, how to track for lies and misinformation. Give us the full and actual data, and allow us to make informed decisions for what is best in our own lives.

But, I digress.

After watching Zeitgeist in the capital of the fifth largest economy in the world that was suffering a moment of 14% unemployment, which I was personally affected by, I went deep. I stumbled upon Aaron Russo’s Freedom to Fascism,the book Inside The Crystal Triangle, and so so many more. I started learning about the movement to a cashless society, about tracking dots and the surveillance state. I learned about the Georgia Guidestones and the Freemasons, about sacred geometry and the energetically amplifying power of sacred architecture. I also turned agoraphobic and paranoid, selling off my stock portfolio, getting rid of my bank accounts, trying to live without a driver’s license and papers. I got rid of most of my earthly possessions, and stuck the rest in storage to go travel around the country with a group of native spiritualists, living with a medicine woman in the mountains of Pennsylvania for a moment, and out on the Greenwood rez for a few moments.

For years, I listened to Coast to Coast with George Noory, and watched every video Regina Meredith produced on her pre-Gaia network, Conscious Media. I found the platforms of Freeman Fly and James Bartley. Mostly, I was in it for the UFO stuff, but there is a large cross-over between UFOs, secret government operations, and conspiracy theories. You go in for one, and you get a bit of them all.

At the height of my fervor, my mother and I were having a conversation where she asked if I really thought any group of people could get along and be single minded for so long to execute any of these conspiracies that I believed in. For years, I sat with that question. After a good long while, I began to think, No. Humans are too selfish, greedy, and glory bound to be able to do any of this crap in the shadows for long. We love gossip too much. The only way secrets stay hidden for long is if everyone is dead. And, even then…

Only, our current state of affairs is changing my mind, once again. I remember hearing about The Heritage Foundation when I was little, in conjunction with that good ol’ Reagan administration. They were laughed off by those of us focussed on the mainstream as wacko extremists whose ideas were so far right that they would never be a real threat. No one in their right minds would ever consent to that kind of barbarism. No one would willingly vote to go backwards so far, to restrict their own freedoms, to willingly cede their own rights, or the rights of their wives, sisters, mothers, and daughters.

But, here we are. Exactly that is happening with zealous fervor.

We can look back and see just how it happened. This think tank partnered with a group of religious extremists who feel they have God—the Christian God—on their side. Politics and organized religion have always gone hand in hand. Some might even make a pretty solid case that political manipulation is the entire point of organized religion, but I will hold off on that for another time. These very intelligent people(mostly men) came together and wrote out their goals. Then, they broke down their plan in incredible detail, never faltering, always keeping their eyes on the prize. Every seeming setback was just one more opportunity to create their narrative and gain traction in the collective.

When I was a young voter, I was such a naive Pollyanna. This was a time of third party candidates, and I truly thought that if I put my vote behind one who more fully represented my personal beliefs, that we could at least get the 2% of the federal vote to gain funding for the party. I voted for Ralph Nader, fully standing behind my conscience, knowing that I was in a solidly Blue state and that we were not in jeopardy of splitting the vote and swinging to the Right. California’s electoral college votes would go for the Democratic candidate, no matter what. I still stand behind that young idealist and the vote she cast, but in recent years I have come to a much more jaded conclusion about politics in America: we are a two party state, and that ain’t likely to change any time soon(unless we go the way of Russia, and become a Single Party state). Beyond that, it is more dangerous than ever, at least for the fate of women in this country, to fall prey to the idea that voting third party means anything other than dangerously splitting the ticket. I wish things were different. I wish the parties were more diverse, and more representative of their base. But, they are not. This is what we have got.

All that being said, I am pretty fucking disappointed in the Democratic Party these days(having changed my beloved Green status back in 2020). They are at once spineless, corrupt, and moralistic. On top of all that, The Dems are truly an umbrella party. We are the catch-all for the many millions of Amreicans who don’t believe in a Christian god, who are not white landowners—or who are not steeped in that Confederate mythology—and/or who believe that the government is here to ensure basic human rights for all.

Given all that, how do we move forward? How do we ensure future success, despite these egregious setbacks we are now living through?

It is my belief that we need an overarching ethos that the whole party can get behind. We need to stop being reactionary to the whims of The Republican Party, and stand for something that is all our own. We need to create our own narrative outside of Christian Evangelical Nationalism. We need a guiding light, a carrot, a prize to reach for. Then, we need a group of our most brilliant minds to create a manifesto, a strategy, to get us there. We need to employ the same tactics that our opponents have, such as funding influencers to promote our ideals; to reach students on college campuses to wear our swag, and make it cool to care about other again; we need to actually listen to and embrace the cares and concerns of not just our base, but that of “the others” as well; we need to talk about, and show, how cool our side is, that caring about education, the environment, others(other cultures, other stories, other spices and foods and ideals) is really fucking cool. We need to show men that we love them. We need to show that loving men and creating a world where women and minorities are also on equal footing are not mutually exclusive. We need to understand, and teach, how distorting to a world view having money can be, but also that it is not inherently evil, and does not necessarily make one bad. We need to teach about all the horrors that can and do come to pass when economic disparity is allowed to grow. We need to show how sexy it is to financially back charitable causes.

But, those are my personal ethics. Are they representative of the whole umbrella? If we don’t have some ethereal god to ask the masses to turn to, then what would our unifying factor be?

For me, this is where my belief in Animism comes in. I believe that Life Force Energy runs through all things. I believe that there is virtue in anthropomorphizing All That Is. When we create stories and myth for our culture to turn to that displays the sensitivity of things like rocks, water, birds, and wind in a human context, it makes those things more relatable. They are no longer dead, unconscious commodities for our consumption. They are thinking, feeling beings who we share this entire organism with. For, we are not alone. We are not separate from our environment. We cannot, and do not, exist outside of Nature. And who is to say, that if EM gets his wish and continues this Colonist Fever Dream all the way to Mars, that we would even survive living off planet. There is always the potential that humans are a part of this being we call Earth, the way a nucleus is to a cell.

But, if Animism isn’t your jam, maybe we can all go in for Consciousness. Maybe consciousness can be our guiding light, not just the consciousness of humans, but of plants, and water, and clouds, and critters—the consciousness of the collective, and the entire Earth, Herself. And, maybe one day, we will discover that the entire Universe is a conscious being and we are just particles in a vast network of conscious Galactic Beings.

Could this be the something outside of ourselves that helps guide us all out of this Nihilistic darkness? Is this enough to give us something to live, and fight, for that is bigger than ourselves? Bigger than our own short lives?

I would certainly like to think so.

This article was originally published on Substack. You can read the original here.