There was a time when I believed the government looked out for us. I still believed when the Twin Towers came down. I still believed the government was good. Fundamentally. It wouldn’t lie to us.
It was during the long War on Terror that I really started to question. That was the forging point of many of my generation. That was when we really grew up and learned the truth. That the government was not on our side. It was on it’s side. It would always want more power and it would never give it up. And people should never trust it.
I’ve lost friends over the years because they decided I’d gone crazy. I’ve been cancelled multiple times because I refused to say what I know is wrong. I try not to preach at people when they don’t want to listen, you understand, but when they ask, I tell them what I know. And more than one has walked away and never come back. It’s one of the reasons I treasure those friends who stay.
But I’ve always known, deep in my heart, that things were not going to go well for us. Unless more people woke up and saw what was going on. That neither party leadership were on our side. That just going back and forth between Democrat and Republican Chosen Ones would never change things. Would never make things better.
And then a New York City Democrat businessman who knew the Democrats wouldn’t let him get the nomination decided to run on the Republican side. He wasn’t another Chosen One of the party leadership. They hated him in fact. And I thought he just might be the right kind of outsider to make a difference. I didn’t think he’d win, but I voted for him in the general election. I have never stopped trying, you see. I’ve never given up.
I’ll never forget returns coming in and seeing he won. That was the first time since my twenties that I believed we might just have a chance of getting out of this in one piece. That the long twilight struggle against a growing government blob might actually not be a twilight at all.