A Message to America

My fellow citizens,

I speak to you today not as a politician or a figurehead, but as an American.

In many respects, life goes on as it always has. You have railways and grocery stores, firefighters and ambulances. You can drive your car to work and read on your down time. You can correspond with others, and sit down with a glass of scotch and enjoy a piece of music. Yet despite the existence of these experiences, deep down you can feel it; that there is a tremendous sickness in this country, isn’t there?

With every passing day, the longing inside of all of us grows. Everywhere we go, the decay of the America we grew up in is apparent right in front of our eyes. Corruption, and lawlessness. Conformity, and mediocrity. Fear, and weakness. Where once you had passion and bravery, you now have elites and bureaucrats dictating your compliance. Your elected officials have abandoned you, you are kept sick and dependent by pharmaceutical behemoths, and your speech is controlled by our new big tech overlords. In hopes of an escape we spend on shiny new toys, and allocate our time inundated by cheap dopamine hits through a screen. Our souls fester with the poison we consume, and we sleep away our dreams while we are still awake.

I know you can feel it. We all do. This is beyond our manufactured right versus left paradigm; it extends into our very humanity. The fires of creativity and wonder that burned in us as children is all but spent, and it has extinguished itself in the mundane and ordinary thrust upon us from every corner of our experience. Most are haunted with the nightmare not of things we regret doing, but of regrets of the things we have not done out of terror of difference or failure. Where once you had magnificent and extraordinary art, literature, and oration, you now have emails, tweets, and podcasts. The ideals and creations that at one time drove humanity forward have been all but forgotten, and have now been admonished as relics and bygones. We have forgotten history, and thus, we have forgotten beauty.

I understand why we have done this. I know it is no easy task to be a warrior and stand against destruction. Yet every time we recognize this ruination and do nothing, our shackles become tighter, and our conscience bleeds with the courage we have denied it. There are many who are responsible for this malady that plagues us, and many more to come who will prosper off of extending it, but if we want the real culprit, we must only look at the American people themselves.

The law of the herd and the majority’s acquiescence has taught us to jilt our courage, our creativity, and our questioning. Like docile deer, now in lieu of standing for what is right, we instead choose safety and security assured to us by our government, and comply aimlessly with their breaches of power and promises of prosperity. We assume lives contented with not an ounce of bravery or passion, and slug along our own timeline with nothing to show but the material we purchased and our similarity to a manufactured, unnatural ideal. The only ones who end up prospering are the ones enforcing these edicts and promoting such staleness, and those who comply with the vapidity and constraints - who are made out to be virtuous by the selfish and greedy - are merely molded into cogs and spokes in the greater machine.

Fear may take you, as individualism and righteousness are easier to think than to act. But there is something that should be more dear to us than security in life, and that is liberty. Breath without the freedom to object and question is merely just existence, and our placated animal minds will be all that remains, gorging on the slop the caretaker provides with no thoughts on grandeur of ideas or even what lies beyond the corral. Our body takes fuel from food, water and sun, but morality, truth, freedom, justice, beauty; these are the satiations of the soul, and provide the sustenance not of survival, but of living.

What I ask of you today is to abandon the machine entirely. Live, live! Live with the fervor of that childhood curiosity and human instinct that drives us to be greater than what we have settled for. Question everything, chase the passion, and become the supreme of both Apollo and Dionysus. Do not shun your suffering and fear, embrace them and dominate them. Leap across the gorge and try what terror has denied you. Find the enemy, and defeat them. And above all else, search for truth in every crevice, every person, and every experience you encounter, and then, and only then, can we demand a humanity that can never be stopped or silenced.

-Will Witt