The Lie of Liberty

(and why facebook isn’t helping)

America just celebrated its 245th anniversary of independence from England. Which is its own white lie, anyway. Email didn’t exist, so signing a declaration on July 4th meant dick to the crown or any other nation of the world. July 4th might as well be called “We don’t like dad and we’ve decided to move out, now we just need to tell him and deal with the consequences” Day. Seriously, celebrating the “birth of the nation” on July 4th would be like celebrating your own birthday on the day your parents fucked. But let’s set aside factual details for the sake of theme and tone. While the nation may well be free of the crown’s rule, Americans are by no means free. And let me let you in on a little secret—they were never meant to be.

In the 18th century, the British landscape was one of familial royal power and tightly held political power by a parliament of the wealthy and elite. When the colonists decided to part ways with the crown, it was not in some pious effort to bestow freedom on the masses. It was wealthy landholders and religious leaders who, having reached the glass ceiling, wanted to each take a crack at playing king. And they weren’t even creative! They followed British parliamentarian procedure and electoral standards in determining who should be eligible to vote and hold office. They followed British guidance in taxation, banking, and coining currency. Hell, they even let British banks underwrite the whole enterprise. The only thing new and innovative they did was eliminate the king!

Sure, there was a lot of talk of rights, but for whom? Not the 3+ million slaves in captivity, or the millions of women denied suffrage, or the millions of children old enough to work but not old enough to vote. Of the approximately 30 million inhabitants of the colonies, hardly more than 20 percent were viewed as “people” in the eyes of the newly established nation. “We, the People” was a very small club that depended on a majority being outside of it. And still today, America is a collection of small clubs of monopoly men that sprinkle money in the streets and let the scurge* scuffle for it, from sea to shining sea.

There is a fish bowl. Inside is a nation. It is filled with the inhabitants, controlled by the government, fed by the banks, and exploited by the landowners and profiteers. The key difference between the People and the people is on which side of the glass they stand. So if the government prints the money then lends the money to banks who in turn lend to businesses that exchange the money for time-value with laborers who then give a percentage of earnings to the government and deposit the rest into a bank that then lends the money back to the laborers at an inflated rate, WHO GIVES A FUCK IF TWO DUDES CAN GET MARRIED?!

How can it be that the people who, 245 years later, still aren’t part of “the People” are more concerned about matrimony and pronouns than they are in having actual ownership of their own nation? How is it sensible that people would rather argue over what bathroom children can piss in than the fact that the government mandates sovereign citizens to subject their children to thirteen years of confined indoctrination? For fuck’s sake, would someone please help me understand the collective density of the mindless masses? Currently there are people discussing the idea of creating MORE RULES because one condo complex fell down on a coastline made exclusively of condo complexes that haven’t fallen down. Currently there is a nation uniting under the cause of ‘Free Britney’, yet can’t be bothered to free themselves. Currently there is someone suing a toaster company because the company didn’t warn him not to make toast in the bathtub. And we can’t even have a conversation about it because the new-age public forum of social media is in hot pursuit of chilling free speech.

If you have even half a mind to laugh at the darker side of life or wind up people that are clearly asking for it, you have undoubtedly been in facebook jail. Facebook makes up arbitrary guidelines that determine what you can and can’t talk about, who and what you can and can’t support (or make fun of), and at whom you can lob arbitrary death threats (terrorists, OK! cops, NOT OK). What kind of guidelines are these? Facebook can’t even articulate its own rules and restrictions in any clear way, never justifies its arbitrary decisions apart from “because we said so”, and encourages users to report unsavory comments and posts to facebook, as opposed to just moving on. Facebook is less a business and more a shitty parent. But facebook gets away with this shit because it is a business, not a public forum. If it were a public forum, users would be entitled to the same rights of free speech and free expression that they are entitled to in the actual ‘public space’. Before even getting into the multiple disconcerting issues with facebook playing thought police, let me ask: Why is there even a question of whether facebook is a public forum? If the goddamned white house is using it to disseminate information to the public, it’s a fucking public forum.

Let’s look at the structure of facebook, yea? A user creates a personal profile and has complete control of what the world can see. A user creates a page and has complete control of what the world can see. A user creates a group and has complete control of what can be posted, who can join, and what the world can see (a mini-facebook, if you will). The operative word in all of this is “can”. The word is not “must”. No one is obligated to look at anyone’s shit. No one is being forced to view, experience, or suffer anything. If someone does see something on a profile, page, or group that offends or upsets them, they can block it. And in the brief moments of targeted harassment that do occur (usually by an entrepreneur who wants to teach you how to be an entrepreneur), you can block that motherfucker too.

So without hopping onto the wide open highway of scathing commentary about grown-ass adults who are still compelled to tattle, let’s point the question at the entity interested in controlling content—why? Set aside all posts that would already be illegal in a real public setting, please. We don’t need brainless tangents to defend clear and overt censorship, social conditioning, and psychological grooming. How about the guy who has “nigga” in his user name catching a weekend in facebook jail for using “nigga” in a post, because in the post it’s hate speech but in his name it’s not? How about the guy making fun of nazis catching a 48-hour ban for supporting nazis? They seem like ridiculous examples, but they happen. Now imagine the person engaged in a lively conversation about how to deal with corrupt police or by what manner we should be allowed to defend ourselves. If this person says we should tell mom or dad, no pasa nada. But if this person makes any suggestion of taking the law into your own hands (which all 50 states permit to varying degrees, by the bye), this person not only has their comment removed, but is ejected from the discussion and the platform for a period of 24 hours to 30 days. How can this result possibly encourage anything but a one-mindedness aligned with facebook’s ideals, however arbitrary and inconsistent they may be?

If at this point you somehow think I am taking a political side, I assure you I’m not. I have about as much use for politics as I have for asking a plumber to fix my cable. For however America may or may not correct itself and better itself, I sincerely do not give a singular flying fuck. I used to be such a fan of subtle and clever language when it came to matters of civic discourse, but who’s got time to sit and reflect anymore? Anything you posit, you are expected to support with evidence. But if you present the history that supports the current state, it is dismissed as history, and if you present individual examples, they are dismissed as not representative of the whole. Unless of course you want to prove that vaccines kill, then one in six million will do. The simple fact is, no one is interested in fact, everyone is interested in recognition, and as long as there is still a glimmer of hope that the individual can achieve success, who gives a shit about changing the system? That being the case, I don’t give a shit whether team red or team blue is calling the shots, as long as they don’t fuck with my liberty.

But they do. They fuck with my liberty all the goddamned time. Hurt feelings are now akin to a broken leg, and I’ll be held liable for the injury. I’ve gotta simultaneously watch my mouth, ass, and step all while watching the increasing cut that Uncle Sam takes out of my pocket for this intrusion that is pawned off as “protection”. In a form of twisted irony, it leaves me at a loss for words.

But I do wonder, am I the only one who read Orwell??? As has been said countless ways throughout history, we are born with liberty in our hearts and we are conditioned to abandon it before it strengthens our minds. The system was designed to have masters and slaves, employers and employees, farmers and livestock. Regardless your allegory, there are those who run the show and those who play their part. The sick humor of taxing, regulating, and manipulating a nation’s people with a heavier hand than it controls its banks and corporations, all while boasting the slogan of “land of the free”, is so dark, so twisted, so offensively obscene, you would think the mere mention of it would be a golden ticket to facebook jail. Somehow that escapes the censors. Don’t make fun of nazis, though. We can’t risk you hurting someone’s feelings.

*If you’re checking in on the asterisk, this is only to inform you that I make up words.