Before All Of This. Ever Went Down.
And then the world changed. The average person says it was for the better.
The Birth of Civilisation I (20000 BC to 8800 BC)
The Birth of Civilisation II: Cult of the Skull (8800 BC to 6500 BC)
The Birth of Civilisation III: Owning Things. Property. Evil City #1 (6500 BC to 3200 BC)
Here are the defining characteristics of that change.
The best of the changes was the last one, Writing, a mere 5000 years ago. But even so, it developed as a tool for expressing the deeply harmful concept of Owning Things–Property itself.
We created symbols, impressed into wet clay, to say: So-and-so owns this grain, and here’s a list of who owns which grain, and which land, and which … people.
Inequality was Invented, and continues to be re-invented today, and will be tomorrow too.
The earliest writing, in its very reason for being, was thus inextricable with the worst of the changes, social hierarchy. From the beginning, it wasn’t art, like a lion man sculpture or a cave painting. It wasn’t Poetry. It was … Accounting.
As for Agriculture–Cultivation is Labor, and labor can be exploited for the same ends as writing.
Hunting isn’t labor. Gathering isn’t labor. There were no laborers, before farming. No one forces other people to hunt.
Slaves built the Pyramids just as they would one day build the White House. There’s your monumental architecture, too.
Only … as Robin Greenfield has pointed out recently, there’s no such thing as a slave.
There are only human beings that have actively been enslaved.
No “illegals”. Just people made via Civilized law illegal by the fact that they crossed nomadically over some line in the sand that is just as made-up and fake as the law itself.
By “civilization”.
No workers of the world, but only people who have been forced to work, or starve, because they don’t have the option of hunting buffalo any more.
Working, primarily within urban environments, Egypt or Detroit, for Fixed Rations, or “wages”.
Civilization, via ownership, having made hunting and gathering illegal too, then killed all the wild, un-owned, undomesticated buffalo.
Just to be damn sure.
***
They want you to stay focused on what all this has done For You.
And to never think about what it has done
To You.
***
They want you to celebrate the illusion of your liberty.
They want you to forget that everything you get (“for Free”) is paid for with the liberty
of someone else.
Perhaps a nine-year-old girl in Rafah.
Or the homeless veteran at the traffic light, yeah thanks, for your service, old son.
Or the battered drone who sat behind you in class, who was never as smart as you, or worked so very hard as you, and was left behind, very tragic and all
while you rose through the … Meritocracy
and reaped the benefits
of living in this so very Free and Civilized way.
They want you to believe that you are blessed.
That it is your duty to vote, for either the shill, or the puppet.
That God smiled upon you and danced a divine jig when you weren’t born in a … Shithole.
That your freely given Charity and your flag decal will get you into some kind of heaven someday, even if you’re too smart to believe the one about God.
***
I have a lot more to say about it all; “in Writing”.
I wanna do right.
But not right now.
***
Part Two. Speaking Practically.
I’m not mad at you for killing off the Red Pearl mainly because she’s already been dead to me, for me and my purposes, for a long time already.
Here is how it gets made right.
***
The very minimum: 4WD, or at least AWD, and sufficient driver legroom of 41+ inches
Longevity/Reliability: I want it to outlive me, and do it cheaply, including …
Fuel / Mileage: at least 25 mpg, and
A round trip of (say) Silver-Riverton is $250 for 2000 miles–50 such trips = 100K miles
Then …
Cargo Capacity: of one Twin XL mattress, 38.5 × 79.5, plus minimal luggage
and/or
Towing Capacity: 2500ish pounds. 2 Twin XL Mattresses. 2 E-bikes? A barebones kitchen.
I have some cheap ideas, about what to build and tow (**see note below).
So …
Sure, maybe it’s a Crosstrek/Wilderness. Maybe an Outback.
Maybe a Kia. Maybe something else.
Whatever best meets the criteria
and does it sooner rather than later.
I won’t live forever.
***
I’ll be holding onto my Lariat as a daily and local driver to get me to where I want to walk, and patching it up as needed.
Everything else, including the van and the current cargo trailer, is expendable.
(The van by itself is a poor attempt to do it all-in-one, pretty expensively and not super reliably. Therefore, spending money on it beyond the absolute bare minimum is just wasteful, and temporary. I’ll pay for two more tires, but after that, meh.)
***
**Note below:
I absolutely love this guy’s paranoia because
1) It’s very much like my own, but …
2) It’s carried to an extreme that makes it seem absurd, and so I feel better about myself.
My own variation on this approach … maybe it will have cameras.
But I am not going to care about Stealth in the parking lot of a dead hardware store, because … I don’t want to sleep, OR be awake, in the parking lot of any store, alive or dead.
I would much rather drive out to a place where I’m just not seen at all.
And I don’t care about the hockey game.
And bro, I don’t want to keep my food in plastic bags, either; it’s just ugly.