I Withdraw My Consent

The president's executive order on student debt forgiveness is making all of the expected waves. It is a virtually empty gesture which will benefit the recipients little, and cost the taxpayers more, not a great deal more, but something more.

It is enlightening that an obviously cynical attempt to buy the votes of what is, considering the amount of debt they have accrued in return for virtually nothing - the country's stupidest demographic, has generated so much heat.

Read enough history though, and you realize that it is frequently the small things which act as the spark that ignites the blaze. That is why the first signals of great events are often missed by those doomed to suffer the consequences of those events.

The arrogant are attuned to the grandiose - if it is not a war, riot, flood, or some other world changing occurrence - if they are not central to the story, it simply doesn't matter.

Down here at worm level however, we aren't equipped to deal with the enormous. We are too busy navigating daily life to devote the effort to understand a trillion of anything, a debt crisis spanning a continent, or a meltdown in the real estate market. And even if we skipped changing the oil to spend time learning to read a balance sheet, it's not like there would be much we could do about it anyway.

Consequently, it is the more trivial abuses which weigh on the mind - a half billion in chump change to bail out a company whose CEO is a big democrat donor, a justice department raid on a business whose owner is too outspoken against the party, a little message coordination from the white house to the media to make sure they are all on the same page when it's time to slander the decent people who publicly protest the latest outrage - the steady, daily accumulation of insults which must go unanswered due to life's other commitments.

So, in response to Obama's latest, almost offhanded, bit of machine politics, I have an inconsequential reply.

I withdraw my consent. This is not my government, and the man sitting in the oval office is not my president - he is a tribal leader who has chosen to treat half the people of the country as enemies to be plundered to provide largess for his followers.

I know my withdrawal of consent changes nothing. I know that if I offer any meaningful resistance to the rulers of this country they will not hesitate to use force to compel me to bend my knee. I know our aristocracy sees me as less than dirt and views what meager wealth I have as a resource to exploit for their own benefit. I know they would not hesitate to take the food from my family's mouth and leave us to starve so that their dogs might eat. And I know they consider all these things to be right and just and proper because I am not of their tribe.

I know all these things; I am not stupid.

My withdrawal of consent changes nothing - almost nothing. It changes me, and I am not stupid. If I realize these things, so must others, and hopefully many others, and perhaps those who think of themselves as rightfully our rulers will be so fixated on the grand events of their making, they won't notice the crowd behind them until it is too late.