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Beginnings are hard, but these times are harder.

I’m tired of the infighting, I’m tired of losing the class war - it’s been going on for decades. In times like these, we need community, serious community. Free pizza and soda isn’t going to cut it. Neither is fighting with your neighbors on f*cebook.com.

1. Why this, why now?

Hate, bigotry, and racism are on the rise. What are any of us doing to stop it? The rot doesn't stop at the core - it runs down to the particle level, to the entangled origins where everything we are now was already written, and everything henceforth will have to be reckoned with. To understand it, we will not start at the beginning. We'll start where we stand, then trace the threads backward and forward until cause and consequence collapse into a single, undeniable picture. A picture worth studying, analyzing and determining if the future is even worth fighting for.

The exhaustive battle of neighbor to neighbor conflict has taken its toll. Everyone is so mad, and only some know why.

It’s not a single entity, but a conglomerate of hateful players who care about one thing, one thing only. Here is who it’s not - It’s not your republican neighbor, or your libtard eldest sister. It’s not the hispanic family keeping to themselves, or the propagandised retiree who’s barely scraping by to make enough to live on in a months time.

It’s not you, it’s them. “Them” carries significant ambiguity and a level of skepticism that we will carefully, thoughtfully unwind.

Knowledge is power, and while I’m not gate keeping knowledge, I’m tired of not being able to share what I know, what I read, and what I want for my community, as well as your community.

2. Building something organic, something relatable, something worth reading.

If you’re having a hard time, then a few things to consider. You’re human, times are hard, shit literally sucks so bad. “What’s with all the negativity”, I’ve been called negative and pessimistic all of my life. Right now I am more than ready to create the world we thought possible, and likely now it’s even more out of reach.

We need to be realistic, it’s not easy, it’s not fun. But each and every single one of you have the passion of 500 suns, and together, we can create enough energy to make some decent change.

This substack is committed to remain free, people love free. Reading content that inspires you will make it worth it. While paid versions, which I’ll be honest - I’m not attune with these types of mechanics, are out there - I’m simply looking to expand community into something serious with respect to building a better world.

I will be using sourced and cited data in my grounded analysis and contrast of these messy, dishonest, subversive efforts to manipulate the public.

I will also be sharing some anecdotes of people I’ve been talking to in my local community, withholding their names out of respect. If you have something to share, I’m looking forward to reading it.

3. The plan? Uhhhhhh… lemme think, shit my wife’s coming.

I will be posting as often as is feasible. I’m embroiled in many efforts, it’s time consuming. But I’ve been wanting to write for a while, and it’s late and I’m being called to bed. I actually have no serious intentions on heading to sleep, even with my already stacked calendar, chock full of meetings to regard tasks that are out of my purview, menial and beyond my pay grade.

Like so many of you, I’m just trying to survive for now.

So, For this series, I want to relate the present to the past — however far back we have to go - because there’s a real and true subversion happening, it didn’t start yesterday. It’s insidious. It’s unkind. Unkind to you, unkind to the animals, harmful to your children’s health, toxic to the water you drink and the air you breathe. And for what? Trillionaires?

A trillion is just a number. You can write it as a one with twelve zeros ^{1,000,000,000,000}, or as a string of bits, or as ten characters of hexadecimal - E8D4A51000. Choose your costume; each one is exact and none is more real than the others, because the notation was never the point. What’s real is the thing the number stands for: the concentration and unfettered consolidation of wealth, and the claim it makes on everything around it. The figure on the screen has been scrubbed clean of consequence. It doesn’t taste like the water downstream. It doesn’t sound like a child who can’t breathe. That’s the trick.. the cleaner the number looks, the easier it is to chase without ever looking up.

So call it what you want. But if you’re not helping people, what are you doing?

If we are stewards of this earth - we surely haven’t acted like it. Actually, let me rephrase that, because it isn’t your fault: many of us were never given the proper chance to care for our communities the way we want to, the way we need to, the way communities are meant to live and breathe. The decisions got made for us - in haste, in greed, with complete disregard for your well-being. By people who never had to live downstream of their own choices.

That’s the part that can change. Not the math. Who holds the pen and makes that change possible, against all the odds.

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