My Ideal Government

I try to stay away from political posts these days because I know that many people find my views "radical". However, some interesting conversation last night led me to investigate my own beliefs about anarchy and expand on what I think. I was asked, "What is your ideal government?" After a while, I realized that the question proved impossible to answer. I have always and will always view government as a necessary evil; an entity that works to ensure it's own survival above all else. Yet, I know that without it, society cannot function or advance. A well-oiled machine does not equal fairness or justice. A government can, as ours does, profit off of extreme inequality; the slavery that is poverty.

When you're poor in the United States, it is almost guaranteed that you will always be poor. The only way to escape poverty is to lie, cheat, and steal. For that, you are later punished through a for-profit prison system which works frantically to maintain the status-quo. You see, if rich people lie, cheat, or steal it is socially acceptable according to the system. The banker isn't going to jail for his theft, but the bank robber will spend half his life or more in prison if caught. Therefore, you must passively witness the enormous amounts of wealth surrounding you without a word of protest against those who oppress you. If you dare to reach out to it, you are chastised. The ghettos here do not differ much from the ghettos in other lands. The people who live there almost always spend the entirety of their lives in abject poverty - a fate handed down to them by the powers that be.

Race is a factor but not as much as it used to be. True, nobody cares about the little black boy who was shot or the black teenager who was violently raped. But, nobody cares about the poor white folks in the trailer parks, either. Children from poor families seldom end up on Amber alerts. No one cares about the racial/gender/class profiling of the TSA, the NYPD, and most law enforcement agencies where the soldier class is taught to view difference with suspicion at best and utter disdain at worst.

It is no surprise then, that the military industrial complex feeds on the lack of job opportunities for poor kids in rural areas in the same way that the prison industrial complex satisfies itself with the fresh blood of black youth. "Army Strong" advertisements target rural, white teenagers and young adults who know for a fact that the military is their only job option. They will be taught how to be good little foot soldiers who kill brown people in foreign lands for the sake of stealing resources as they plunge a once-thriving nation into the brutal depths of colonial subservience. God bless American imperialism.

The middle class is the most ingenious invention of the twentieth century. What better way for the government to divide the working class than by creating and implementing the educational industrial complex which spreads the false idea that some workers are more "special" than others because they dutifully acquired an expensive piece of paper. What they don't tell you, however, is that if you decide to self-educate through public libraries and other free paths to knowledge, you will never be taken seriously by the elitists who partied their way through Ivy league colleges for lineal bragging rights. Nor, will you be allowed through the fiercely-guarded gates of corporate enterprise into what is deemed by our society as "respectable work". Many geniuses are paupers.

What is my ideal government? One where the clutching chains of economic slavery are broken and all are truly free to take part in society in a way that is meaningful, absent of class, gender, and racial considerations. Maybe this is too utopian for you. But I will strive for it until the day I die. That is what it means to be an anarchist.