That Sense of Uneasiness

Do you sense it? That feeling of uneasiness which seems as if it's soaked into everything like a faintly discernable odor, from the nightly news to random conversations with strangers while standing in line at the grocery store or sitting at the doctor's office. Nothing feels safe or secure. Very little, if anything, has that sense of familiarity or comfort to it any more. You subconsciously find yourself on guard every time you go out, or when your children go out to play or even go to school, or something as innocent as when you let your pets out at night. You're not sure what or who is safe anymore. Even the sacred has a sense of hollowness about it.

Corruption, crime, violence in government, schools, the courts, and even our places of worship has almost become commonplace and almost brazen; we barely take time to even register it unless it reaches a new level depravity. How often to do hear of a teacher raping one of their students? Now ask yourself how common that was when you were in school. Or what about the trusted pastor who has for decades used their religious authority to abuse children, only to see them moved to a new state or new church where they can continue while the victims are threaten and intimidated for saying anything. Or politicians sending naked pictures of themselves and showing remorse; no humility when found out. We see or hear practically every day about deeper levels of the debauchery that would have made Genghis Khan flinch so often we've almost become numb.

Society seems to be decaying. Our so-called political leaders are more concerned about their careers and pleasing the new crowners of power---transnational corporations while "We the People" have been stunned into apathy. We need to rebuild; to regenerate a society based on the traditional values or norms which have stood the test of the ages; which can provide the foundation to create a stable new society; norms like the family unit (and by extension, close friends), neighborhoods, and community.

We must find ways, large or small, to become less dependent on governmental institutions and the corporatization of society; to break the chain of control. We need to take only what works the best and leave the rest to rot in the wastelands of history. By that, I mean accepting from government only those things society can't do alone. We need to look to ourselves by volunteering, developing local networks for mutual support, shopping and buying local whenever possible, grow as much as we possibility, start our own cottage business if possible, and even barter.

The time has come when we need to circumvent a dying system; to ignore it; to refuse to acknowledge its authority over us. This is the same technique that other passive revolutionaries such as Gandhi used. Gandhi defeated the British Empire at its imperial height by convincing the Indian People to ignore it. After years of violence, the Irish employed similar techniques. Sergey Nechayev, the Russian anarchist, employed these techniques too, shaking the Czarist regime to its core so much so that Nechayev was declared the most dangerous man in all of Imperial Russia (Sergey was even denied his name. After being sentenced, he was henceforth referred to simply as "the prisoner in cell number 5". Nechayev also wrote the treatise, "The Revolutionary Catechism" which has been employed by nearly every group bent on societal change since its publication in 1869 ).

To refuse to accept the dominance of the system is to deny its power, and denying acceptance of this power is to deny its authority. Thus, to deny its authority is perhaps the ultimate act of non-violent revolution an individual can offer, though perhaps the word "revolution" should more properly be rendered as "devolution" since we're talking about return to our collective roots of community through acts of citizen activism.