News from Patriot States of America—4
It was a confrontation I had dreaded from the moment I opened my eyes. Lierson, my father, is a successful man—at least measured in one way. Our family is full of the type so there was no shortage of models to learn from, provide motivation; and materially speaking, he enjoyed an advanced starting line which he acknowledged only by bringing in the divine: God has been good to us, and so much is expected of us. He did his part—showed up when the auctions started, put pieces of land together, created a cattle empire, heavy equipment contracting on the side. He worked hard—no small thing—and recreated himself with his beloved hunting and fishing expeditions all over the world—with me along on many of them.
I’m his only son, and I knew he had always imagined me carrying on after him, keeping what he built in the family, keeping the PSA alive. My two sisters will be willing enough—if you can imagine two hyenas and one carcass.
I understand my father, but he has absolutely no way to understand me.
He already knew. We sat down and he locked his eyes on mine, but I found it almost impossible to look back at him. He projected his steel demeanor but I knew I had brought a challenge to his world unlike any he had ever known.
“You want to defect to the Blues,” he said—not asking but seeking confirmation, with an undertone of incredulity, contempt, and repressed pain.
“Yes.” Silence. “Sir.” More silence. “It has been one of the most difficult . . .”
“I don’t care about any of that, Wingar. I just want to make sure you understand that if you defect, you will get nothing from me, and you won’t be welcome back.” He kept his eyes locked on mine.
Like everybody in the PSA, my father calls himself a Christian—but in his mind the first duty of a Christian is not prodigal children, but loyalty. Not that I’m particularly prodigal.
Another rather long silence. Then, a little softer, a plea. “Can you tell me why?” He just couldn’t get his head around it.
“I need to be somewhere where I can think what I want to.”
“There is no such place.”
“I need to try.”
“Do you want me to tell you how you’re going to think in twenty years?”
“No. When you were my age you thought what you thought and you haven’t changed.”
“I haven’t found anything I want to change to.”
“I have.”
* * *
Like any social structure the PSA has worked well for a small group of people—Last Men like my father—and except for chronic unemployment and, too often, a weaponized species of boredom called by a variety of other names, fairly well for those in the middle: hedonistic consumers in full pursuit of mediocrity, who ask only for comfort, a constant supply of Feel-Good, something to blame, distractions to keep them from thinking, and an afterlife with more of the same. Those on the bottom have fared no better than they had before the Partition they’d been conned into supporting—still unequipped to flourish in the modern world, mostly ending up in camps, still excelling in gullibility, blaming the Blues.
I was born into the early PSA and had a pretty good life growing up: sports, plenty of gunplay—real and game—freaky good porn, Feel-Good, weekends spent in heavy armor bludgeoning each other with clubs and maces until somebody fell down. I guess it was fun.
There was no such thing as being accused of rape, and of the guys I used to run with I doubt there were any who hadn’t committed it, including me. It was hard to say. Like all Bug People—minorities, deviants, the disabled, Blues, whatever, that were put in camps, women were almost always blamed for outcomes inconvenient to men. I’m sure I have children, I don’t know how many—in camps for the unwanted, forced to live their lives. Maybe they’re doing okay, I just don’t know. It happened to one of my sisters—when she had her baby she tried to keep it, but it looked just like the guy who had raped her, down to his smirk. “It’s impossible to love him,” she said. My father supports her and the little time-bomb, but he’s never done anything about the guy.
I’m thirty-five years old and have only recently come to understand that I grew up in a haze. Maybe everybody everywhere does, I don’t know. But when you get that feeling that there’s a door that opens, briefly, and if you don’t step through it now you never will, it scares the hell out of you. Not just living a lie, but knowing you are, and you only get the one chance.
You just absorb the facts, the values of the environment you grow up in and assume you will continue that life and maybe you never do really learn how to think outside of that. Hell, not maybe—for a fact most people don’t. But occasionally somebody does—and if they don’t get disappeared, you realize they’re the only hope of anything ever changing. I guess I’m one of those, and it’s a mystery. Like consciousness itself—in certain places, it just happens. Nobody knows how yet, and maybe they never will. And you realize it’s the people with the low cards who want things to change, and the people with the high cards who don’t: the people with the power—not only to keep it from changing—as long as they can—but to make the low-card people want the same thing, and think it was their idea.
I suspect for most people there’s a point, probably late in life, when the illusions they’ve created, or had implanted into them, to justify and protect themselves, fall apart. I think it’s usually pretty sudden. You can see the narrative you’ve constructed about yourself, and you realize it’s never been anything but evasion and you just can’t buy it anymore, and you see just as clearly what’s really there when it’s gone. I wanted to go ahead and get that out of the way.
Mind you, I haven’t lost my prejudice against Blues—because all my life they were Them. A culture of femininity, passivity, people who not only can’t see the forest, they can’t even see the trees, and spend their lives fixated on the bark. People willing to sacrifice everything modern man has gained to prop up their silly and guilty illusions. Trivial people who confront reality, which answers only to force, or finesse, same thing in the end, with committees that include everybody!
Then you see that that too is just another narrative to control people.
For me the catalyst was the discovery, through illicit online channels, of other people like myself. They were in Blue States, but it had nothing to do with Blue or Patriot. The door opened, you know. And what am I giving up but comfort, security, and a big truck? It’s nice to go from here to there in a big truck—but I’ve noticed that when you get wherever it is you’re going, in a big truck or not, it’s still just you.
October 27, 2023