Independence Day Is Coming

As we approach that day we set aside each year to celebrate our independence, it would seem sensible to take inventory of that independence before we whip out the sparklers. After we face up to the reality that independence is a nice idea, but we don't actually have much in the way of that good stuff around here any more, we could still decide to party for three days. Or we could, possibly, sit down and think about some things.

The government is the embodiment of the will of the people. At least in theory.

Being a country of self-ruling people was a new and unusual idea back in the beginning. The experiment, as it is strangely called, refers to the unique, bazaar, anarchistic, rebellious, unconventional, rule breaking, law breaking, authority hating, independent people called Americans, who threw off the chains of others controlling their lives, and decided they were just going to call their own shots from now on instead.

It wasn't a very popular idea back then, because then just as now, people were too wedded to the notion that they must be loyal to their controllers and obey them. In fact, if the founders were here today and did exactly the same things they did then, they would be branded terrorists by our own government.

Being free is not for chickens.

At least there was once a moment in time when enough of us were not chickens, in order to get this experiment off the ground. What a shame it is that we've come full circle, having watched as our own government unraveled and undid all of the hard work it took to get to independence. All of the blood that was selflessly shed by others so that we could be left alone by wicked, greedy, brutal authority has in the end, all been for nothing.

A great deal of blood has been shed for the idea of freedom. But now our minds are pumped so full of propaganda and clever bromides of illogic, that we actually believe freedom means obeying the government and meeting with its approval. We are beyond lost.

There were good reasons that our founding anarchists decided to stand up to authority and throw it off. Authority back then, as it is now, was corrupt and completely disinterested in the well-being of the people. It was greedy, brutal and unconcerned with the social realities and needs of the average person.

Then as now, it was almost impossible to make a better life for yourself because the roads to opportunity were monopolized and controlled, by the king, by the rich, by the corporations, by the soldiers, the authorities and the police. They ran rough shod over the people and nobody gave a damn for your rights, you had no rights. Nobody gave a damn if you were injured or starving or needed help. They only wanted your money, your taxes, your labor, and your obedience and otherwise, as far as they were concerned, you could FO and die.

Back then, as now, people just didn't matter unless they were wealthy, and if you weren't wealthy you might as well forget having any kind of a life worth living.

Then as now, the king took your crops in taxes leaving you to starve, and punished you if you didn't pay up, no matter how outrageous the demands. You didn't get a choice then, and you don't get one now. Don't think so? Just try to defy the IRS, go ahead, I dare you.

What's behind all of this is the same old story. Greed and power. The two things that really make the whole world go round. We can see pretty movies and read pretty books about freedom and democracy, love and compassion, but there's no money in any of that, and there's no power to get either. There's no room for the brutality the rich so enjoy meting out on those they victimize and enslave. That is, after all, how the rich and powerful get rich and powerful in the first place. The reality is, they are nothing but criminals that attack and brutalize others to use them and steal their wealth for themselves. Instead of calling it crime they call it business. Call it what you will but the outcome speaks for itself. A rose is a rose.

Our founding anarchists knew all about this, and they knew when it was time to do something to finally, finally, break free of the grip of the controllers. They wanted freedom and independence bad enough to risk everything, absolutely everything, including their lives and property, to become subversives and move against the control of the king. They wanted to be in charge of their own lives and prosperity, they didn't want anyone telling them they could not do what they wanted to do. They were tired of being robbed by endless taxes and kept down underneath those who monopolized prosperity. So they fought.

And for a while we benefited because of the many lives that were willingly sacrificed for freedom's sake, and then we forgot all about the fact that freedom is never free, nor is the battle to stay free ever over.

After centuries of history, of civilizations that were always comprised of a ruler, a king, an emperor, a pharaoh, a pope, a warlord, whatever form it took, it has always boiled down to one guy and his cronies way above everyone else, cut off from and indifferent to the people, inaccessible, disinterested, warring, selfish, completely detached from reality, spoiled to beyond comprehension, obsessed with wealth and getting more wealth for themselves to get more unnecessary stuff for themselves to look and act rich with. That knowledge and being good and tired of the status quo made a handful of ordinary people decide that the whole situation of rulers over people was a truly bad plan.

That truly bad plan finds its perfect symbol in the pyramid, a symbol you'll find on the back of our own dollar bill. A pyramid is an enormous structure, four sided and immovably sturdy, wide at the bottom and growing ever and ever smaller as it nears the top where it comes to a tiny single point.

That very same shape expresses the structure of the truly bad plan, with the masses of the people making up the bottom, those with no wealth or power who comprise the majority of the population. It then grows ever smaller in width as wealth and personal power increases, until eventually it reaches the top where there is room for only one. The one at the top has the most wealth and the most power of all.

It is interesting to note that superimposed over the symbol of the pyramid could be the shape of an exact duplicate of that pyramid upside down. This second pyramid represents the distribution of wealth and power of the first pyramid, with the vast majority of the wealth and power up at the top, then going downward in ever decreasing amounts until it gets to the bottom where the many have so little. A very precarious structure indeed.

This is the structure I refer to as the truly bad plan. This is the structure those fed-up, founding anarchists understood so well, and rejected so fully.

There is a good reason for this. It doesn't work. Or rather, it only works for a very small number of people. Those at or near the top massively benefit, but everyone else loses out. Everyone else has to struggle to get enough, and world wide, even greater numbers cannot even do that.

It is an unfair, unreasonable system that has no justification. There is no reason or justification for the few to have so much more than they could ever use, or want, or need, for a thousand life times, while at the same time so many have nothing and suffer and die never knowing the feeling of a safe warm bed and a continuously full belly. It is easy to see that simply turning the 2nd pyramid right side up would create a state of equity and a logical, necessary, stable distribution of wealth and power, leaving no one in particular in possession and control of the vast resources encapsulated in that structure. It would in fact negate the pyramid shape, because the structure would no longer symbolize the reality of that civilization. Instead we would use a circle, which is equal all around with no discernible head or tip or point, with nowhere that any congestion or monopolization of the flow could occur.

If we could get honest just this once we would have to concede that it makes no sense at all for the few to have more than anyone has any excuse to have while so many don't have enough.

If we could stay honest for just a few more seconds we would also admit there is no argument to the notion that by now, with all of our supposed technological advances, we should all be living comfortable middle class lives.

We should have no rich, and we should have no poor. Rich and poor both are completely useless, pointless and socially self-defeating for exactly opposite reasons. Eliminating them both by transforming them into a center class where all needs are met and there is enough time and wealth and power for all to be involved in the meaningful living of life, that would be the best possible situation not only for all involved, but even more so for everyone as a whole.

A great deal of solid good could be accomplished when there is no longer poverty and no longer monopolization of power and decision making. It would greatly reduce the largess and corruption and do more than anything else to take a real bite out of crime. Much that is unbalanced and destructive in our present system would fairly well cease to be.

Unfortunately, this will never happen for several reasons. The first is that a system of sensible equity could never be imposed, it would have to be done voluntarily or it would never work. There is no way to force people to be fair, or decent, or honest, or nonviolent. There is really no way to force people around to any method of belief. Regardless of how necessary and beneficial those concepts are, they cannot be forced on human beings. And because there are human beings who are never content unless they have much more than the other guy has, and they can get more by legalized theft and by force to benefit themselves, there will never be a voluntary agreement and restructuring of the rules and methods of a system to do those things.

There always has been and there always will be an absolute refusal of the rich and powerful to concede their control over the people of the world because they don't care about humanity. They don't care about the suffering of others at all. They are people who's human values either never existed or were poisoned by raging greed and other diseases of the personality. Their focus is only on themselves and having everything their way, not because it's justified or valid or because it makes any sense, but only because that's the way they want it.

Who hasn't asked themselves why things are allowed to continue this way when its so obviously unfair and disgusting? We have all more than likely stopped along the way to notice this disparity of justice, hope and quality of life and more than a few have agonized with deep sincerity over it, not understanding why we simply cannot live in a decent, kind world when it would be so easy to do. The answers are not in the laws or the system, it is because we agree to it. We accept to one extent or another that we should all have the right to try to get more for ourselves than the other guy.

Instead of turning it around and working to get more for those who have the least, and thereby eliminating poverty and lifting the world at the same time and getting our own needs met, we do the opposite and achieve the opposite. We focus on the people at the top getting ever more for themselves, just for themselves, and we all do the same, creating ever more poverty and ever more disparity as we go. It will not be until we remember that selfishness is one of the causes of all of these problems that we as a species will ever decide to finally make the adjustments necessary to see to the needs of those without, until there are no more without. It only makes sense.

We have modeled ourselves after the worst human beings in the world. The greediest, most violent, most self-centered, arrogant, self-serving, bigoted criminals on record. Their ceaseless advertising and self-promoting self-glamorization has saturated our society and saturated our brains for the last century, until we all but forgot the simple difference between right and wrong, good and bad, fair and unfair, humane and inhumane. We all want to be exactly like they are. Rich and pointless. Depraved and indifferent to the whole rest of the world. We just want our fine wines and fancy chef's meals, our nice cars and our external appearances of affluence. We've actually bought into the stupid idea that money makes the man. We don't know that what we need most, what we need in order to survive, in order to be sustainable on this earth, are the things that money cannot buy.

It is well into the time where our personal levels of comprehending how the world works should be brought to the foreground of public discussion. It will take a long time until the majority of people are willing and able to rethink the power structure we are all so familiar with and so invested in. Many many people have bought into the thick mesh of overlapping mutually supporting ideologies that sell us this power structure as a good thing that benefits everyone. But it is becoming ever more clear that it does not benefit everyone, and it doesn't even really benefit the few at the top beyond the mere count of dollars and fleeting privilege that is only good for the span of their own one lifetime.

The truth is that we may all be well intended but we've got it all wrong. We're doing it backwards and can't see that, so we keep asking the same questions of why things are the way they are. Because things will never change. They are the way they are because we keep doing the same things that can only come out the way they always come out.

Our entire focus upward is incorrect. Our focus needs to be reversed. Instead of serving those who have it all, we should ignore those who have it all and always want more, and focus on those who have nothing.

This isn't about biblical values, although the bible so many claim to take to heart espouses the same principles. Perhaps the bible doesn't go far enough by explaining why, when Jesus walked the earth he ignored the rich and destroyed the temple of the money changers, and went directly to the poor and the sick to heal them. Jesus didn't act like he was better than everyone else and he wasn't impressed with anyone who did act that way.

If Jesus came to Earth and went to live with and amongst the people who were suffering the most, then you'll have to tell me why the hypocrites who claim to be so religious and holy would sooner be caught dead than to care about anyone but themselves. Men are greedy and petty, jealous and selfish and Christ knew it. But Christ didn't act that way, he acted in spite of men who commit their lives to selling themselves out to everything dark and destructive just so that they could wear fancier clothes and feel like they were something.

We believe that a man is truly great when he has more than anyone else while others have nothing, and he can order other people to their death. What's not to admire about that? It does so much for the world. Though Jesus would say and do exactly the opposite, let's not notice that and just pretend he thinks so too.

Jesus led by example which is the best way to lead, but even he knew he would not find too many followers behind him. Perhaps it would have helped if he'd also explained why he came to Earth and lived as he lived, not as a rich powerful man as he surely could have, but as one of the many. Not as someone who judged others as beneath him but as just like him. Perhaps when the bible was written people didn't need to have it explained to them. People today most certainly do. Christ did not snub his nose at the prostitutes or the felons or the lepers, he lived among them. He had no desire or use for pieces of gold or silver. That's not what it was about then, and that's not what it's about now. Gold and silver are not where the answers lie. If it was where the answers lie we could have bought our way out of this mess a long time ago. Clearly that's not the answer.

As self-evident as that fact is, and as often as we can hear somebody say they know that money can't buy happiness, none the less seeking money is still the number one activity in this world. It is what everyone gets up in the morning to do. It is the accepted primary activity that defines how we live on this world. It is what we do. It is what we are most concerned about and it is what we spend the lion's share of our precious time doing. We all seek money.

After centuries of this money-seeking based societal behavior we have not achieved anything in the realm of true improvement. That glaring fact is easily overlooked however because in the endless quest for money, we have created many things. Many things that make money. Many things that cost money. Many things to spend money on. And we are delighted with those things and we accept them as a reasonable substitution for having what really matters and what we really need in this world. We are content to accumulate and play with our myriad toys and brag of our expensive achievements, not because they've accomplished anything of note, because they haven't, but because there is nothing else for us to brag about.

We have lost track of reality and feel more comfortable with lies than truth. We are amazingly capable of failing to see the forests for the trees, of missing the point of damned near everything, and yet are absolutely certain that living as selfishly as possible makes us Godly people.

The biblical story of the loaves and fishes is one example where so many people completely miss the point. Jesus tore off enough bread and meat for himself and then passed the rest along, and everyone else in attendance did the same. The result was that everyone ate their fill and afterwards there were bushels of food still left over. This is chalked up to magic and otherworldly miracles without fail, when miracles had nothing to do with it. It was the simple act of everyone taking what they needed for themselves and sharing the rest of what they had with everyone else that not only fed everyone, including those who came with nothing, but in the end yielded more than enough to do it again. That is the point of this story, but I know the thought of such sharing with those who have nothing disgusts many. It is no wonder the religious set prefers to chalk it up to magic rather than common sense that everyone can duplicate, and benefit every bit as much from.

The fact of the matter is that because we are so disgusted at the notion of helping others, we live in constant fear of not having enough for ourselves. Because of our refusal to make sure other people are getting their needs met, we know better than to expect anyone to care about us or help us. We are all on our own.

Our access to having enough is always and eternally precarious and we know it. At some level we all understand that we have no control over this system and because of that we have little control over our own lives and well-being. For most of us, it is always up to somebody else how well we'll do in this life and we have no power to change that.

In case it needs to be said, that makes us slaves. We are not free, and we are not independent. We don't call our own shots. We report where and when we are told to report and we do whatever we're told, even if it offends us or bores us to tears. Even if the pay is lousy and the job is beneath us and has no future, even if it has no meaning to us. Even if it means killing perfect strangers, locking people in cages for what they eat or say or wear, or torturing people because they are bad and we are good. We have been reduced to obedient, silenced laborers who don't even complain as our pay is reduced, slashed, by the removal of benefits, by corporations consuming our retirement savings, by the bankers slashing the value of our dollars by over 60%, just in the last six years.

We believe we must not speak out or stand up for ourselves because our prosperity, such as it is, is wholly dependent on us pleasing those who decide what we are worth to them. Fear is our greatest motivator and that, sadly, makes for a very poor motivator. When we do what we do out of fear we are living in a constant state of fight or flight syndrome, a steady low level chronic fight or flight feeling if we're middle class, and a raging fight or flight feeling if we're upper or lower class for the exact opposite reasons. No one is able to extricate themselves from the chronic illness of underlying fear. It is fear that motivates us through our entire lives, and the world today is in the condition it's in because of all that chronic and selfish fear.

We are depleted and exhausted as a species, working ever faster and harder in the aim of ridding ourselves of that fear. We want to be free of it, to experience security, and finally be able to relax and feel at peace. We're constantly coming up with ways to increase output and productivity and always with the stated goal of not having to work so hard and long, and yet no matter how much productivity increases we end up working even longer hours and have less to show for it. We can never feel at peace.

Increased productivity is not a human need, or a natural need. It is not one of the things that sustains us. An artificial goal created to achieve selfish, artificial results, could only be a bad thing. Productivity is only something corporations salivate over. For the rest of the world it's a bad idea.

Increased productivity actually increases all of the evils and things we fear and wish would disappear from this world. Increased productivity increases poverty, because it reduces the number of jobs, not the hours in a work week. Increased output creates an exponential increase in pollution, environmental damage and the depletion of limited natural resources, what other outcome could there be? We could see it if we looked, and when we look we do see it. But still we keep doing all the wrong things some more in the deluded hope that maybe this time it won't come out making everything worse, even though there is no other way it could come out.

There are many who are driven to the point of destroying themselves, their families, or others in the aim of securing themselves financially. They are highly motivated and focused almost entirely on freeing themselves of that chronic underlying insecurity. Ironically, very few ever reach a point of leaving their fear behind because once they have accumulated the wealth they gave up everything else to achieve, they now must fear losing it. It never ends.

Getting as much as we can for ourselves and our own is what is at the heart of our blind selfishness and self defeating way of seeing the world. Even though we know it's not possible, we continue to try to buy happiness with dollars. I don't know that we'll ever finally conclude that it cannot be done and decide to try something else instead. I do know that the sooner we reach that point the sooner we can achieve those things that we really need. Not just for ourselves but for the whole world.

Perhaps if we could begin to see the mechanics behind it, the rational, definable causes and results of making the selfish pursuit of wealth our number one planetary activity, we could begin to see there is no mystery to why things are the way they are. It is not mysterious. It is no more mysterious than a mathematical equation. This plus that equals this. It's simple stuff. It's something you can count on, it can only come out one way.

When our number one focus is achieving wealth for ourselves, then whenever the expected benefits are a portion of wealth, we will inevitably ignore the expected consequences. Repeating this pattern millions upon millions of times can only lead to what? An ever increasing load of ignored consequences that will inevitably reach a point where they can no longer be ignored. Those accumulated ignored consequences will end life on earth. That's not a scientific prediction, its merely simple common sense.

Right now in 2008, it is beginning to come into common awareness that we are going to have a global, financial, social and environmental collapse. Those ignored consequences, the consequences of the selfish pursuit of personal wealth, are catching up with us and overtaking us. The so called Global Warming phenomenon will not be what kills us. It's only one of the symptoms and we could argue over whether or not it is a man made phenomenon but there is little point in doing so. It really doesn't matter. It doesn't detract one iota from the overwhelming reality that our decades of pursuing wealth for ourselves instead of for each other while ignoring the consequences have all been a sick, sad joke. It's been nothing more than a slow form of suicide for all. We don't need a single dollar in our pockets to survive but we do need clean, drinkable water, and fresh breathable air to live. We need fresh, nutritious, unadulterated food to survive. If those things are gone we will die. It is that simple. That is a truth that cannot be circumvented and we all know it.

If you had the choice between wealth beyond your wildest dreams OR having fresh air and clean water, you'd be stupid to choose the wealth. You couldn't live longer than two minutes without air in your lungs so it would be the least intelligent choice anyone could make.

Tell me then why we all make exactly that choice every single day of our lives? We all choose wealth over clean water, clean air, natural clean foods and environmentally nondestructive styles of living. We don't even do it for wealth beyond our wildest dreams, we do it for just enough to get by. Surely we've figured out by now we'll never get rich working for someone else.

Every single one of the choices we make today that ignores destructive byproducts is a choice for our own obsolescence and in support of that which is unnecessary. We didn't have cars until a hundred years ago, we don't need cars to survive. We only need cars to survive in a world that is solely fixated on achieving personal wealth. Not for all, but one by one, one at a time, every man, woman and child for themselves. It's an incalculable amount of duplicated, wasted energy that overproduces, and results in pollution, depletion, horrendous waste and lots of money for a very few people. And those very few people pocket the money instead of keeping it in circulation for the common good.

Putting the extra wealth back to work for everyone would be absolutely contradictory to the whole paradigm of "it's all about me and getting more for myself" that we all live in and we all subscribe to, even though in growing numbers that may be largely to do with the fact that we seem to have little other choice. That is our system. We don't worry about tomorrow, we only care about getting our needs met today, right now. So we keep doing everything we've been doing and then some, and it keeps bringing the day of total planetary suicide closer and closer. It will come. It's already here.

Forty percent of our rivers and lakes are now so polluted they are toxic to human health and cannot be used for drinking water. Sixty percent or more of the large sea mammals are gone. 25% and counting of our small invertebrates are dying off; as are our bees, creatures who's extinction spells a rather immediate end to having food to eat.

It is plain to see that our failure to make our priorities what they must be, to continue to believe that money matters more than life on earth, to pretend there is any choice in the matter, is to sign our own death warrant. There is no choice. It is illogical to do other than to turn our priorities upside down and inside out and worry about the condition of the earth and it's creatures first, then move up the food chain. We have to make our bed to lie in, and the one we're making now is actually one we're simultaneously hacking to bits with an ax. There will be nothing left at the end of the day but splinters to lie down in.

We can do better than this. It's completely within our grasp. It's 100% possible to make the changes, they are all within our ability to do. We did after all create the mess we're living in today, we can un-create it. What we can't do is bring back lost lives or nature that is lost or destroyed because those are irreplaceable. We do not create nature and cannot replace it once we use it up, kill it, pollute it, or poison it with depleted uranium munitions that will last 8 billion years. At the breakneck pace we're going now it's not going to be a case of slow suicide, but rather fast suicide.

So what is the problem? What's keeping us from putting on the brakes and stopping the madness? If you're willing and I'm willing to make the radical changes that must be made before it's too late, what's holding us up?

I return to where I came in. Government. The government is supposed to be an expression of the will of the people. It is not. It possibly never has been or if it was it lasted a very short time. Because the nature of people as previously mentioned includes those who cannot grasp that there is more that is important than just themselves. It is they, and they alone who are forcing us to commit planetary suicide and continue living in a violent, brutal, unfair world. Their fixation and addiction to money and power, their obsessive compulsive drive for wealth and control has the whole world by the gonads and they will never, ever let go.

Which leaves it literally, completely and totally up to us to let go of them. It is we who will have to reject the financial system that defines planet earth, and find the alternative lifestyles that will allow us to continue not just our species but all of the species detrimental to our continued existence.

In the world of corporate strategy, all that matters is more money. Corporations are the beast consuming the world and it is you and I who must stop feeding the beast. That means going without things that we ignorantly believe make life worth living. We have to fully comprehend that money can't buy us happiness, and only when we really get that will we be able to let go of the social mind control programming that is completely and totally about buying and selling your way to happiness.

We must reject all that is mindlessly mass produced because it is a form of violence. Serious violence against all of us. We're hurting ourselves by supporting these vast machines of supposed supply and demand. We have to return to the natural common sense strategy of making what we need for ourselves. Life is local and it must be lived locally. To force a contradictory paradigm like globalism onto the world weakens us, and makes us dependent on a system owned and operated at the whim of corporations and their sole interest of profit making. What's to stop any global producer from simply deciding there's not enough profit in shipping products from China to the United States? What if it was food? Then where would we be?

Why should we agree to leave ourselves so vulnerable to such a forced, destructive system that can't even supply us with fresh, clean or nontoxic foods in the first place? Is this government our servant or our master? It is clear our little democracy has fully reverted to what systems have always been. A pyramid of power of the few over the many, with the primary goal of using the populace for it's labor and stealing it's wealth, leaving us impoverished and without necessities while those at the top literally bathe in wealth and privilege. We do not have the power to change this. It is done.

Unless blood is to be spilled by the thousands of gallons again on our own soil, the people fighting each other while the rich get rich off it, the only other option is to simply refuse to comply. This comes down to the individual level, one by one, each and every one, deciding and determining their own way that life should be. Joining with others of like mind will start the revolution. There are many ways to do this, our creativity and ingenuity can finally be put to real use and the satisfaction it brings will nourish and empower us, and feed us like never before as well as being the best kind of advertising there is.

Simple and obvious ideas include: instead of using our front lawns to grow pointless grass, we should grow our own clean, healthy and natural food. We can produce massive amounts of food on very small lots, and when the majority of any community does this, we'll have variety as well. We can learn to sew again, and even learn how to weave our own cloth. I hate to tell you this but we're going there anyway. It's better to do it our way and by choice than to have it forced on us when we're least able to respond to it.

We don't have to stay brainwashed into believing everything costs money. It doesn't have to. We can choose to simply share and exchange, just because we can. We can remember all the realistic good that comes of giving and sharing, taking care of our community, and making life more important than cold hard cash. Everything does not have to boil down to money, believing it does is what's keeping this whole world entrapped by the masters of manipulation and accumulation of wealth.

The point is for local communities to make their own decisions and rules and laws, to decide for themselves based on their own principles and real values how to best see to the needs of all so that there is prosperity everywhere, not this blind and selfish obsession with more for self and screw everyone else and the whole planet too. It doesn't matter so much what the particulars are. What matters is closing down corporate control over our lives by seeing to our needs ourselves, and by reconnecting with reality, because it's really not a choice anymore.

We can do it smart or we can do it stupid, and waiting and hoping for the elites in our government to do anything that will change the status quo is the height of ignorance. They will not help. In fact they will do everything in their power to prevent us from disconnecting from their system of dominance and control.

If it's all too much for you to think about, just boil it down to the bottom line. Do you want to be a slave that's slowly dying in a polluted world? Or do you want to be free and live a meaningful life in a different way that you yourself decide? To me that's an easy choice, how about you?

In closing, the most important aspect of gaining true independence means thinking in all new ways. Remove the boundaries inside your mind, and don't think about how things are set up today, think about how they should be set up that would most benefit everyone. Business hours and business days are somebody else's paradigm, break on through to the other side. Nothing has to be the way it is.

What are you to do? Where do you start? What are the steps? That is for you to decide. There is no one but you who knows what you should do or where you should start. There are no steps. There is no one who will tell you when and where to report and what your duties are. That's all for you to figure out. That's what independence means, doing it yourself. You will have to work with others, talk, discuss, share ideas, help each other. Perhaps you'll hit on a system that you can share with everyone else, no doubt a few good basic systems could be widespread and adapted to help others get started. We have a lot to do. And in doing it we will for the first time in our lives, and for the first time in a very long time for our country, be doing what we were supposed to be doing all along. Living as independent people, self sufficient, not dependent on and not beholden to anyone who can claim to be above us, or who can claim to have a right to what we make for ourselves. The benefits are obvious, the rewards are limitless, and the only thing that's stopping us, is us.