Aftermath

Most everyone at sometime or another wishes for somethin’ else. You can spend your whole life thinkin’ about the what-ifs, or the maybes, but that don’t get it done.

Had a highly educated friend one time, who told me that people hate predictability, right up until the point they don’t have it. Likely that he knew a lot about it. His wife left him for a more exciting younger feller. Then, when they got tired of that, she wanted to come home. So he let her. Not that anyone predicted that. You get enough book learnin’ you can reason your way into all sorts of predicaments. Even life and death ones. Maybe even especially them.

If you spend too much time in your own head, you convince yourself that the abstract problems matter more than the real ones. Of course, everyone has their own truth these days. Pretty hard to define the truth, when only yours matters. Don’t be fooled. That ain’t conviction. Having your own truth, or being true to yourself, means your constituency is always right. If you’re always right, then it ain’t a leap to think everything you think or say is righteous.

Problem is that we’ve forgotten to question ourselves. We’ve lost the importance of doubt and contemplation on why we think, we are right. Like all erosion, it was incremental over a long period of time. Sure, you can look back with clarity and point to the majors, but to me, this war, that disaster, a never-ending pandemic, have nothing on the residual decay of we think and what we value. Don’t worry about nations or empires, our past is filled with civilisations that gloriously self-imploded.

People laugh at me when I make the mistake of thinking out loud. So, I doubt myself and give it some more contemplation. Then I always come back to a varied theme of the same question. Who is crazier? Someone who wants to control the seas, the rain and the wind, or someone who says we need to return to controlling our own selfish desire?

Who are we saving that section of rare coastline for anyway? Some wealthy gentlemen who keep the odd mistress at their summer homes, far from the life of predictability and personal problems? Who else can travel or use the equivalent of a small nations resources to live in a way that they can buy off their lavish lifestyle with credits?

Jealous? Probably. But more like I’m tired of being told how to think, especially when I have to pay double what I used to just to keep warm. Everyone must sacrifice, go with less. Unless you can afford it. Don’t make the mistake of thinkin’ I want someone else’s hard earned. I don’t want anything re-distributed to me that I haven’t earned. My grief is that we the people have forgotten, what humanity is capable of and what happens when governments control people rather than the other way ‘round.

Some people who speak about their own truth also say that History is subjective. Now you can argue to the end of time about why the French or the American Revolutions happened, but to flip the past and judge it by your truth, now that can be almighty dangerous. Too many people these days trying to impose their societal belief on what made people think one hundred, two hundred… a thousand years ago. Seeking legitimacy, I guess.

Always figured it be the other way ‘round. All those people lived their lives, striving for a future, for better or worse, experienced life. They may not have had the technology, medicine or education that we have now, but it was the best it was then. Reckon we could still learn from them about the human condition. That ain’t changed… not ever. Not since the first lyin’, cheatin’, murderin’ motherless son walked the earth. That there, is the real reason to enforce a modern concept on a long past situation. If you keep the attention on the failings of the dead, you’ll never have to reflect on your own behaviour.

Pa told me once that I was born old. Maybe. I reckon it helped I had to grow up real quick. You lose enough early on, you know their ain’t no favours all the time. No don’t get me wrong, I ended up with a good life. Pa kept us as best he could, especially in a world gone mad.

You could say I gained perspective right from the get-go. My Parents were good people in a world that didn’t want to understand them. They loved and gave and sweated and lost. Most of all they were mocked for not joining in. They walked the path of conscience. Never concerned ‘em, the weight of the mob’s opinion. Decisions were made on considered opinion and factual understanding. The fear of missing out never came into it. Well, I have a strong feeling that we have all crossed the Rubicon on that one. I can almost guarantee that is why I ended up here. Turns out, keeping an independent conscience can be damned lonely.

Incarcerated for treason was not my life’s plan. Not that I agree with that charge, but I can understand how this particular type of law giver came to that conclusion. They have been raised on an intellectual diet that can’t tolerate even the smallest serve of conservative thought. They think that elected and appointed officials have the only answers. This Government has overreached its mission long ago. Public service, public value, these concepts have long been a thing of antiquity.

I can’t remember the exact moment when I said ‘enough’. It was more like the rising of the tide, this swell of multiple waves overwhelming all that I saw as good and useful. I’ve worked and sweated my whole life. I’ve always been a problem solver. Started on the shop floor of my local timber mill. I was 15 years old. Sure, I could’ve done another year at school, but I would’ve found myself still at the timber mill, a little older and with less experience.

At 18, I went North to the coal mines. The boss of the timber mill offered me a 2IC just to keep me, but that didn’t match that coal would bring. I raised a family and built a home on the back of that job. Now when I say job, I mean industry. I’ve worked in mines, powerplants, factories, I brought change and continuous improvement before they were even a HR catchphrase. As for the need for ‘further training to transition into a renewable economy…’ well Hell.

Why bother adding a master of economic and environmental studies to the conversation. Apparently, graduation was too long ago to count for gained knowledge. Even in the early ‘80s I was already thinking about future industries. Surprised? So was Pa. Wish Ma had lived to see me graduate. I used that education to join the growing motor industry in Northeast Asia. I was captivated by Japanese car manufacturing and I could see the concept of an electric car in future. I knew coal and power, so I wanted to apply that to an industry that would improve the average family’s daily needs. Once I understood car manufacturing, I planned to develop my own electric car.

Motor development was a dynamic, but brutal game in 80s… Japan and Korea were all potential, while Detroit had nearly peaked. Although in my mind it was not the future. You could make friends and enemies in the same minute and every idea was a closely guarded secret and up for grabs at the same time. The endeavour and entrepreneurship saw the rise and fall of the titans.

Then the Asian Economic Crisis of 1997 hit. I jumped back into the electricity game. I could see the rise of alternative sources to coal, but in my experience only nuclear had the baseload capacity to match coal. It just came with the baggage of toxic failure, which in the public’s mind inevitably equalled disaster. I really wanted alternative powers sources to work and in a combination of types I believe there is still hope to progress towards sustainable electricity. Like many problems, our inability to accept change is only matched by our stupidity to believe that the complex can be solved immediately.

I won’t see it happen. I’ve been sitting in this black hell hole for 72 days. Stone, cement and iron close me in. Yet this claustrophobia is nothing compared to what has grown in me in the last decade. Is it ironic that I am trapped in a building that could not have been built without fossil fuel? Wouldn’t it be more sustainable to lock me in a solar panel farm?

No one could believe it when I joined the protestors. My wife comes twice a week. Never says much. Neither daughter talks to me. Our son is still lying low. I helped him escape through a window when the Nationals finally took the building. For the first time in my life, I lied to the authorities when I told ‘em I was the only one in the room. Twenty or thirty years ago I would’ve said… and did say, protests were a waste of time. Now I know firsthand that I was right. The only lesson I’ve learned, is that conservatives can’t protest.

Not only are we not good at it, but we also aren’t legitimate. It was a failed, thoughtless, short-term reaction. Only progressives can protest. They wear it as a badge of honour to stick it to the man. They don’t ever question the righteousness of their cause. But when progressives are the dominant culture? When the normative narrative is ‘we are right, and you can’t speak.’ What then? Rarely do progressives view a centre right grievance as legitimate these days.

Whereas, the true conservative doesn’t crave control, we want a constrained freedom. To be able to choose, as long as we don’t bring harm or death to others, especially the vulnerable. Having given it enough thought, maybe my catalyst was the ultimate government directives on life and death. I oppose legislation that chooses termination as an answer, over the will to live and thrive.

Now because of the poorest judgement of my life, I am marked as a pariah, an ‘enemy of the state.’ I underrated the violence of those who came with us. I am not sure if they truly hid their agenda, in the end, it was my own burning anger that determined the collateral risk as acceptable. But my true stupidity was still believing that elected authorities might pause on the fact that your average working Joe has just had enough. I was there, but my motivation was not violent, I had just run out of dialogue with the politicians who have forgotten how to listen beyond the beltway.

I’m serving the same three years as the wife-beater in the cell next to me, because I had met the fool who fired a flare gun at police and then barricaded himself in with some official’s mistress… I mean private secretary. No judgement here! I carried no weapon, not even a sign in my hands. I didn’t resist arrest. Yet the law judges me by association in this state and the Prosecutor convinced the Judge to include the charge of gang violence, because a handful of protestors arrived on Harleys.

Funny thing is, my neighbour is likely to get earlier parole than me, because his partner is considering taking him back. Apparently, foolishness gets you an early bird here. I’ve been offered a deal too. As long as I say who it was that jumped out of the antechamber window. The security camera was on, but the focus was poor. I’ll never give my son up. Never.

Well there’s no fool like an old one, unless it is a desperate one. I’ll wear my licks on this one, my ego had it coming. What hurts the most is the knowledge that this failed protest has neutered any effective conservative argument. It will take a generation to regain the centre ground. That is if any choose the sensible path. Only further radicalisation appears to attractive to the next generation. With that follows collapse.

Now why would anyone in this nation accept that? The Romans, the Hans, the Aztecs, the Byzantines, hell even the Brits… at their peaks none envisaged the road to failure. They all woke up after the ‘barbarians’ had control. So why be any different? Turns out that power blinds the masses as easily as the powerful. Truth is, we aren’t in decline. Such a notion would invoke some sort of gentility in the process. In response to this long-term internal bleeding, decades of political inbreeding has finally hurled up our Nero, closely followed by Pertinax as the last one standing. With reckless abandon we race towards the precipice, ignoring our mortal wounds, not knowing what awaits us in the aftermath.

Giving that thought further contemplation, incarceration might not be so bad. Better to be exiled, knowing that there is nothing I can do but watch my country lose its faculties.