Stop apologizing. I don't mean you actually saying you're sorry for what you believe, I mean every time you've ever held your tongue. We've been coddling the softest of us for so long we think they're in charge. They're not. They never were. We were just conditioned to believe it.
This was no small feat. It was in our classrooms, our neighborhoods, our friends, our coworkers, our neighbors, our childrens' stories, our books, our newspapers, our TV shows, our commercials, our movies, our art, our music, our gender-neutrally adjusted history, our billboards, our decoder rings, the backs of our breakfast cereal boxes.
It permeated our society like a biological weapon that coated all media, transmitted from mind to mind by written and spoken word.
It is impossible that you still exist.
That you, through your formative years, felt that one splinter of doubt, deep in the back of your mind, and felt it long enough to locate, extract, and examine it. Only to realize it wasn't a foreign body at all. It was the one bit of truth left, and the rest of your mind was foreign.
Confronted with this reality you chose the hard path. You chose to take that splinter, now a seed, and painfully return it to your mind. Burying it deep where it could grow.
It's amazing you still exist, but you do for one reason. because these backward ideas are aberrant to our natures, and deeply different from what we instinctually know to be true.
Weakness is not strength.
Strength is not weakness.
Are you better than the man who accomplishes nothing, blames everyone and everything, including his peanut allergy, his parents for not hugging him enough, and his gym teacher for not making sure he was picked first at dodgeball?
YES.
Because when reality slapped you in the face, you didn't run or hide or make excuses. You learned, you grew, you changed, you adapted. Or maybe you just dug your heels in that much harder.
And while your cheek still stung, you looked it back in the eye and tried again.
When a hard thing hits a soft thing, the soft thing gets softer.
But not you.
Because when life hit hard it didn't make you softer, it made you harder.
Because when the authority figure repeats that unnatural lie with a wagging finger and disdain in his eye, you know in your heart that he's wrong, and your answer is the most powerful word in the world.
NO.
With that single syllable ejected forcefully from your lips, their world shatters, and so do they.
But how do I know this?
Because somehow, YOU still exist.
Because YOU are reading THIS.
Because you are still free in the only place that matters. The last bastion of reason. The final fortress of right. Your mind.
You preserved it for so long, tucking it away from sight when necessary, feeding it morsels from alternative news sources, alternative literature, and alternative people with alternative ideas.
Because you know that these things still exist.
Common sense. Reality. Truth. Honor. Respect. Integrity. Morals. The dogged refusal to give up.
You know they still exist because they still exist in your mind.
Because that's what this fight is actually about.
Because with these powers on your side, there is nothing on this planet that can stop you.
Except one.
Yourself.
They knew this. They knew their weakness of mind, heart, and spirit never stood a chance against your strength. So to hold you back, they used the strongest person they knew.
You.
When elephants are young they are tethered with heavy chains to stakes driven deep into the ground. They are mighty, but still small, and cannot escape. Eventually, they give up. They learn the FACT that they cannot defeat the tether.
When they grow to full size, and become many times stronger than the deepest stake, they do not struggle against the tether, and are held in captivity by a slender rope and a small stake. The only thing holding them back is themselves.
They ENSLAVED us.
They control us with their facts. But just because something is a fact does not make it the truth.
They would tell Edison the fact that the lightbulb can't be invented.
They would tell the Wright brothers the fact that man cannot fly.
They would tell America the many facts why man cannot set foot on the moon.
But Edison did, the Wright brothers did, America did, and YOU WILL.
Because YOU are reading THIS.
Because your chains don't really exist.
Because your freedom really is absolute.
Because your life is actually yours to live.
Because YOU are a HUMAN BEING, and YOU are FREE.
These aren't facts. These are truths.
And to begin to realize these truths all you have to do is say one thing. One syllable. One sound.
NO.
You say it to their faces, while looking them dead in the eyes, without flinching, blinking, or stuttering.
NO.
"I can't tell them what I really think. NO. That's not true. I can."
"I shouldn't do things differently. NO. I want to, and so, I will."
"I'd better do what he says. NO. I can make my own decisions."
"I can't do that, it's illegal. NO. It doesn't hurt anyone, so I can."
"It's impossible. NO. The impossible HAS been done before."
But be prepared for what will happen after you say that powerful word.
Because there is no fury like a master losing control of his slave.
They will rage and wail and threaten and slander and sneer and deride and spurn and scorn and seethe and burn with brimstone and sting with sulfur!
But you will notice one thing they will never do.
They will not stop you.
Because they can't.
They don't believe their own nonsense, they're too smart for that. This is why the rules don't apply to them. Publicly or privately. They know the game consciously or not, and they smirk when they see you following the rules, and they REVEL in their power over you.
Let me say that again; They REVEL in their POWER over YOU.
Every time they condescend you into changing your mind.
Every time they appeal to your better side to make you do something.
Every time they shame you into backing down.
Every time they threaten you into submission.
Every time they remind you of the rules they made up and never follow.
They get a thrill.
It's the thrill of commanding something much larger and more powerful than yourself. The thrill of tricking the behemoth into believing they cannot escape the tether.
So, as one Titan to another, I ask you to do the impossible.
I ask you to do perform futile.
I ask you to break the facts you've known your whole life.
I ask YOU, because YOU are reading THIS...
Pull on that slender rope.
Almost all stakes will pop free at the slightest tug, some will require struggle and strain, and a dangerous few, may take your whole life.
But once that stake comes free, so will you.
The walls that confined you will melt away. Monuments of fact, impossibility, and futility, built larger and greater, reenforced for decades by the careful architects of your mind will turn to DUST, and vanish into nothingness at the slightest breeze of TRUTH. Those glaciers that surrounded you your entire life will melt away and become puddles beneath your feet.
Then, you will truly be FREE.
Freedom IS a possibility if only we remember that what we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly. Freedom carries heavy costs, but I would pay them gladly because you cannot enslave a free man. You can only kill him.
Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated.
There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.It is time for this idea.
Again.
How do I know this?
Because YOU are reading THIS.
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