Do you Command, or are you Commanded?

This weekend, watching the major news channels cover the vote on Healthcare Reform. As is an often happens to me, I fantasized about appearing before the Representatives and putting forth my views on this massive bill that has been at the heart of so much controversy. Yet, ultimately, beyond any epic speech I could have given, one question hit me hard and I wished more than anything I could have asked it of that Body.

Do you command the American People, or are you commanded by them?

And, even though I did not get to ask my question in person, I did receive my answer last night. The Bill was passed and is set to become law, in spite of about two-thirds of the American people not wanting this to be passed.

Pelosi, a woman who is arguably as hated at Palin, spoke with joy of the historic moment upon the bill’s passage. Indeed, the line “historic moment” was probably used a historic number of times. But, I will agree with Speaker Pelosi. This was a historic moment.

But probably not for the reasons she thinks it is.

What will come in the future, I cannot say. What I can say is that it will not be pretty. Even as I write this, I’m sure there are massive protests being waged both online and off. Celebrations are being held, backs are being slapped. And, in dark places, the proverbial sword is being sharpened.

My question was answered last night. The government, and those who lead it, see that they command the American people.

There were many, many speeches last night, by people from both sides of the Party line, neither of which I felt much love for. (I can be classified as an Independent, and have as little love for Republicans as I do Democrats). Yet, perhaps the greatest speech by a living politician I’ve ever heard was given last night.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yj4tH6mCd-w&NR=1

Rep. Boehner, it seemed, got the true idea of what a democracy was meant to be. He got, at least in my eyes, what it meant to represent the American people. He portrayed himself as one who is commanded, not who commands. Now, I’m sure there’s plenty of evidence that he has not done this, that he is as bad as every other politician, but I’m not interested in this at the moment. It was his words, right then and there, that said more than anything.

Yet, his words seemed to fall on deaf ears. I’m not going to discuss the costs or wording of the Bill. That has been done ad-nausea and will continue to be so. Rather, I would like to talk about what I think it means, for me and every other little person on the bottom of the pile.

We will now be ordered, by law, to buy health insurance. Now, buying health insurance is a good idea, but it should be a persons choice. This Bill was sold to America as a way to insure the uninsured. I’m not going to get into the numbers of who is uninsured or why, plenty have done that. But forcing people who don’t have health insurance to buy it, regardless of if they want it or not, regardless of if they can afford it or not, is wrong. Speaking for myself, I rarely go to the doctor, and paying tons of money for insurance that I may not even need is not an expense I want, especially in light of all the other expenses I already face entering the world on my own. I have had dreams of starting my own business, if just a small one, but now I face the problem of providing health insurance to any workers I hire. Now, I don’t know about other businesses, but the one’s I’m interested don’t really produce a lot of capital in the initial stages. Indeed, most small businesses don’t, and every expense incurred in the early stages is something that makes it that much harder to succeed. The economy is already down, people are still losing jobs, and the jobless rate, counting the unreported, is probably in the mid to high teens. Business are having to cut expenses to stay afloat, making the buy healthcare or pay fines is only going to crush the little ones.

Also, I am now going to end up paying more in taxes to cover the bill for people who can’t afford health insurance but must now still have it. I don’t care about Government number crunchers telling me this new law will save money. I’ve been studying history in collage for over four years and covered Governments all over the globe. Every single one of them cost more to run than it ever made. Previously, there was always the ability to invade and gain more resources in order to balance the expense of government, but as that is no longer socially, legally, or UN excepted, I doubt we can invade anywhere to get more wealth. And, since America is pretty much the top of the wealth game anyways, I don’t know of anywhere with the resources to justify such an action economically.

Obama and his administration have now succeeded in creating a debt so massive as to be incomprehensible. It is in the trillions of dollars. It is in the double digits of the trillions of dollars, and it’s only going to get higher. 10,000,000,000 is a big number, and it isn’t even the correct amount of the debt. To put this in terms people can maybe grasp, I’ll use the example of LEGO bricks. A 2x4 brick, the standard size, runs about an inch long by half an inch high by half an inch wide. Placed so that each bricks is stacked on top of each other we would get a tower 5,000,000,000 inches high, or 78,914.14 miles high, roughly half the distance to the moon. As a wall, half an inch thick and 6 feet high, you’d get a length of 2893518.52 feet or 548.01 miles. I’ll let you come up with something that is that long.

And the ink isn’t even dry and already there are calls to get immigration reform done. I hate to even think about what that will entail or cost. Suffice it to say, however, that it will indeed cost.

I am left with a rather sour taste in my mouth, and not from anything I’ve eaten. What happens now? I’m not sure. I do know that at least 38 states have prepared legislation to counter this bill. I know it will be an ugly, drawn out fight in which more than feelings are likely to be hurt and people will be used as political, and maybe even literal, cannon fodder depending on how it goes down. The bill itself is enough to overburden the government’s empty coffers, which seem to have inverted the meaning of positive and negative numbers to begin with. Obama will be lauded as a great hero and even greater villain. The Republicans will most likely sweep the next elections, but in all fairness they can reverse it nor halt it. People around me who didn’t like Obama have said he’ll be a lame duck president, but at this point he’s been anything but. He has fulfilled his biggest campaign promise. He brought Change to America like we haven’t seen in a hundred years. It’s not a change I wanted though. The government controls more each day, and that means I have less control. As much as people like to say everyone’s equal, this isn’t true, because in a finite system there will always be those who have and those who don’t. Arguably, Obama and Co. are working to change this, but it looks more and more like equality equals zero.

The government stated that it Commands the people. Now we’ll see if the people will be willing to give up Command of their government. It will be historic, the only question is in what way.

A Need for Heroes

I think, in this day and age, we are in need of heroes. While this has been true of every age, it has because especially relevant to ours because of one simple fact.

We have no heroes.

Athletes, the main stay of cultural icons at the turn of the 1900’s and the following decades used to provide us with ‘heroes.' Yet this is no longer the case, thanks in large part to the near continuous series of steroid, sex, or crime scandals that taint that profession.

Astronauts no longer are our heroes, and with President Obama finding better things to spend money on, he has all but killed the American space program and killed NASA.

In centuries past it was our soldiers and generals who gave us heroes: Washington, Patton, Jackson, Lee, Grant, and so on. Yet with the current anti-war sentiment that has existed from at least the 1960’s, we can’t draw our heroes from there. Indeed, the average American citizen can’t name the current general of the Iraq/Afghan wars.

Actors and Rock stars fall under the same blanket as Athletes. Sex, Drugs, Crime, so on and so fifth (increased due to inflation) strip them of any heroic status as fast as ink dries on tabloids or someone can log into a web page.

A while back I heard people discussing this issue, I believe on Huckabee and they mentioned the idea that the last presidential election had all been about trying to obtain a hero for the American people: Obama as an African-American Messiah-like figure, McCain the War Hero, Palin the First Republican Vice President, Hilary Clinton as the First Female President.

Yet even that has rung hollow. Obama-the-Messiah (and don’t kid yourself, left and right saw those images and embraced the idea to various degrees) has proven all but incapable of obtaining his goals. Palin has been vilified. McCain is off the radar. Clinton got relegated to a position with no air time.

So where do we turn? Anymore, people turn to comic books and movies. Hence the resurgence in those industries, where a $10 ticket sells like donuts at a cop convention. The revival of movies like Clash of the Titans, grand epics with incredible monsters and larger than life heroes is not just because we finally have the technology to make such things look real.

It is because we are looking for something more.

When society constantly tells us that we are all equal and all the same, that no one is better than anyone else. When no one can stand above everyone else, because they’ll be torn down by the mob as fast as they are raised above it, there is no place for anyone to prove themselves as great.

In education, the common practice of “Leave no child behind” has translated into dragging down those in the front rather than pulling forwards those that lag. The current epidemic of ADD and ADHD that has left waves of medicated zombies in its wake and has destroyed active, excitable kids with the desire to live and explore as much as they can. School days get longer and longer, and people wonder why their kids get fat.

It is because kids can no longer strive to become their idols. They are taught to mock those who stand above, or taught the very things that disgrace their heroes are what they should be doing. Fifty years ago kids wanted to be astronauts, businessmen, politicians, soldiers, or superheroes.

Now though…

I’ve lost track of how many kids I see today dressed up like ganstas. Not the Mafia of the 1920’s, full of power and dressed in press suits, but thugs dressed in rags, acting tough, as if they know what violence is and that makes them superior, as if lots of heavy gold chains and a bunch of girls that are used and abused at will are what makes a man great.

Perhaps my generation is the last to remember what it was like. Heroes fell in our day, but for our early years we had a few, and we could remember the ones our parents had. I know my heroes, the ones who taught me what it was to be a man in place of an absent father and a troubled home life; Corran Horn, Leonidas, Harry Dresden, Wolverine, Magneto, Darth Bane, and many others.

I know what violence is. I looked deep in myself and discover the true nature and power of violence. It isn’t waving around a gun, smacking bitches, dealing drugs, or capping someone for dissing you, especially when you have no idea what disrespect is, much less honor or glory or nobility. Violence is brutal, horrible, elegant, and beautiful all at the same time. Violence is a sword in one’s hand, living on the edge, knowing the next moment is your last and only the Gods and your skill choose if you breathe the next moment or not. It is a painting made with blood and tears and pain and power. It provides meaning to life in a way nothing else can.

I know what power is. It is Nobility, Honor, Glory. It is the ability to choose your fate, to choose the fate of others. Power is what makes the world function.

But there is no one to teach this anymore. No great men and women to stand up and say this is how you should live. This is what it means to be a True Man or a True Woman.

There are many psychological reasons for why this is. I complain about Christianity and its mindset, but I recognize that the teachings of the Christ god are not fully responsible for this downfall, however much it may permeate all aspects of our culture.

It isn’t about what is here, today, that is responsible for why we don’t have heroes. It is about what isn’t. With the current resurgence of Paganism in the West, Western civilization has simultaneously finished rejecting the last tenants of pagan culture that had been buried deep in Western culture. The process of Multiculturalism that has attacked Western Culture so strongly and vilified it, has succeeded in leaving only Eastern Culture in its wake. The religion of the Christ god may be dying, but the basic beliefs are still around, only in casting off the religion, we’ve cast off the bones of the pagan traditions that filled Europe, regarding them as evil or useless.

It is my hope that in Paganism we will see heroes arise for heathen people, but I don’t think society at large will have that many more after this. There is a trend in society that others have been talking about, where the elite have been training people to feel that they don’t deserve their rights, that they deserve to be victims because their ancestors did things that are now viewed as wrong. White children don’t respect white culture. In fact, there is a sense that there is no white culture anymore and when something resembling "White Culture" appears it is normally called racist. I once remarked in a civil rights class that it seemed to me the current pinnacle of manliness was the Black Gansta, and though I was roundly shouted down I feel that I was right. As stated before, lots of “Cool” kids now dress Gansta. Even on colleges, I see more guys rocking the Gansta look than anything else.

I want this to change, but not because I'm racist or feel White people are superior, cause we're just like every one else.

I want us to have heroes again. Not just the ones in movies and books, but physical men and women who stand above the masses and proclaim that they are alive, they are great and powerful and noble. I want to see kids of each ethnic heritage be proud of who they are, especially white ones. Writing this, I know that many would call me a racist if they read my words. I want to know when that happened. I want to know when it became wrong to be proud of my white skin and European heritage, even when I do not hate any other races. I don’t declare white supremacy. I think such things are a joke. There is no superior race, but there can be superior individuals, and I want to see them again.

I want to see violence and power reach the level they did centuries ago. When people understood that they weren’t evil, but good. When people knew when to be violent, and when to be peaceful. In news feeds and television I see leaders bow down and submit when they should stand and fight, giving into people who know what violence is for and have no care for my people and our ways, but rather view them as evil and to be destroyed. I am not speaking of just Islam and Socialism, but so many others that I cannot count them.

I want to see Holger le Danske, Charles Martele, Harald Hardrada, Cnut the Great, King Arthur, and so many others come back in spirit and name, to lead us into an age of Nobility and Power.

I want to see a hero once more

Who I am...

Who I am…

I am a man. I was born this way and I will die this way.

I am straight. I take female lovers, because it is what I desire, despite social pressures and the ideas of other people.

I am a Heathen. I believe in many Gods and Goddesses who demand strength, honor, and nobility from me.

I am White. I come from Scandinavian and Germanic peoples and I feel no shame in this. I am no worse than any other person out there, nor are my people. We have done nothing that everyone else hasn’t done before.

I am Free. I have the Right to speak my mind, no matter how abhorrent others find my views. I have the Right to carry any weapon I desire, because I am a freeman and it is my birth right since old times. I have the right to Life, Liberty, and Property and these rights shall not be stripped from me without me rising up in protest.

I am filled with Pride. I know who I am and where I come from and no one, man or woman, god or slave, shall remove from me my past without first taking my life.

I will die for what I believe in, because there is more to life that living and there is more to death than dying.

I will not hesitate to live what I believe, because if I do any less, how can I say I believe it?

I do not kneel before monotheistic gods of slavery and submission. Their Eastern ways are not mine, for I am a man of the West.

I do not hate because of the color of a man’s skin. I am not superior because I am white. But neither am I lesser for it!

I am tired. I live each day watching my kin fall into the trap of believing they don’t deserve to be free, of believing that Western culture, European culture, Germanic culture, is bad and weak and evil and needs to be done away with in favor of African and Eastern ways. I am tired of the One God leading to One Way, One Government, One World.

I am Tired of being told that those who came before were less evolved than we are now, when the only thing I see having evolved is the ability to delude ourselves into think we are Progressing and that the world wants to be unified with us, when all they want is to see us submit, die off, and become slaves to their ways and lose our history, our stories, our peoples for the rest of time.

I am Tired of people living as if Life was the only thing out there. I am tired of people denying my gods, denying the meaning of our being, in favor of the secular, scientific, nihilistic dreams of men who dreamed of nothing by emptiness and obedience and meaninglessness.

I am tired of people screaming that violence is not the answer, that we shouldn’t fight back, even as wives, children, husbands, and kin are slaughtered, because to take life ourselves is to horrible and it is better to let ours be taken because we are worthless.

I am Tired. Of being told that my views are wrong. That I am inhuman. Simply because I look out for myself first, my family next, and my kin third and tell the rest of the world to screw off.

I am Tired, and I laugh. Because people scream that there are too many of us on this planet and instead of killing other peoples as is the custom of this world, they kill their unborn children, because it is better to kill one’s own people than to kill for them.

I am Tired, and I laugh. For the soldiers called baby killers by people who slaughter entire nations in the womb, unborn, without a chance to fight for life.

I am tired, and I laugh. Being told that because I am straight, I am homophobic, and therefore I must secretly desire to be gay. I laugh, for what need have I to fear mortal men and their sexuality.

I am Tired, and I laugh. Society raises itself on a pedestal made of sand which is being burned away. When did Peace become the norm simply because weak men grew sick of war? Did the Arab, the African, the Mexican, the Chinaman, or anyone else agree to lay down their arms simply because the elite of the Eastern West wanted to never see death again, knowing as they do that there is no hereafter, hinterwelt, or heaven. I have Valhalla, and do not fear my death.

I laugh. The world turns and the striving of the man who follows the Eastern way will fall to the man of the Eastern submission.

I laugh, for the Christ god has killed his followers, in the destruction of freedom, power, and self obtaining.

I laugh, and I weep. For I am a Heathen man, and my kin are Pagan, and the Asatru shall be strong, but everything ends and I foresee only the destruction of my peoples a second time, a final time, as the next form of the East rises up and lays us low in our graves, and all I can do is pray to the Gods and Goddesses that we die fighting as our ancestors did, taste that lost glory one last time, because I am not sure with so few in number that we can win against those who would see us gone.

I laugh, and weep. Tears of joy, for I know the end I choose, and even if I am wrong and there is nothing after, I lived and died in a manner that I can be proud of, regardless.

I weep, and rise up again. Let come the Christian, the Socialist, the Marxist, the Progressive, and the Muslim. Even the Gods will die, but even after Ragnorok there is life and so too will my peoples rise up one more. A hundred years, a thousand, a million, it matters not, because within my peoples are the blood of the free, the strong, the powerful. Make my people slaves, and we shall rise up and destroy our enslavers. We’ve done it again and again in history, the future will be little different.

I rise up, anew. I am filled with hope, for that which is built on slavery will falter. Only freedom is eternal, as long as we carry our sword in hand to ensure it. Let the Christian beat his sword into a plowshare and submit. Let the Muslim bring his War of Peace.

I am a man. I am a Norseman. I am a Warrior, and a Poet, and a Son of ancient peoples.

My existence will not be denied.

My people will not be denied.

My power will not be denied.

Our power will not be denied.

Our Gods will not be denied.

Our Goddesses will not be denied.

Our future will not be denied.

By sword, and gun, and pen, and magic, and everything within the human spirit, we shall rise anew. We shall be as we are, what we are, where ever we are. And not matter what, not death or slavery shall triumph over my people.

Rise up, my kin. Rise up my people. Throw off the Eastern God and his ways. Throw off the sickness of nihilism. Throw off the chains of believing that in order to be equal, you must be lesser than everyone. Look at thy flesh, look in thine own eyes.
Tell yourself you are worth something. Tell yourself that you can have pride. Ours is freedom, democracy, and equality of men and women. Not from a Christian god, but from the HEATHEN! It was our pagan forebears that gave us these! Do not let the Eastern peoples tell you that the West is Evil. We are Good! We have wrought forth so much that has aided mankind. It is the Western man that reached the Moon, because he dreamed not of serving masters of this earth, but of making his own place in the heavens.

Look to the East, and see how they are. They beat there women, enslaving them. We gave ours rights, and freedom. We spake unto them and called them equal unto us long before the Christ god came unto us. But under the Eastern way we too enslaved our women. Return now to the Pagan, and become free, and let women be women, as they were meant to be: feminine and equal and loved, not masculine, superior, and feared.

The West is Evil, yet it was we who first freed all slaves in our lands. We fought a war about it, but that was a war over who was to say when slaves were to go free, not that they shouldn’t. We killed our brothers, not just to free the slaves, but trying to make we didn’t become slaves to a massive government ourselves. Yet those who hate the West still possess their slaves and are slaves themselves in turn.

Will you stand with me?

Will you embrace your heritage, your ancestral Gods and Ways?

Will you throw off the oppression of those who think themselves more evolved,
because they are cut down by the sword rather than doing the cutting?

Will you stand with me?

I shall I stand alone and take all glory and honor for myself and alone be able to face our ancestors and say: “Behold my mighty deeds. I have lived as you lived and died as you died, a Freeman or my peoples.”