Divorcing for Liberty Sanity
Get Poor. Mass poverty now. The only viable non-violent, non-hypocritical option I see.
We are disenfranchised. Voting at the federal level must cease because it does not matter, and we have to stop being idiots. I have faith that poverty will reign once again, like serfdom in the sixties. Just not with the present adults collecting pensions, or making enough hush money at their jobs to support a trillion dollar budget slated for bomb factories and military fascism. 61% of deaths from Israel’s cowardly aerial bombardment of Gaza are civilian. Deaths proportionately higher than all wars of the 20th century. Yup, including the World Wars. If you still feel the need (force) to pay taxes to a rogue government (U.S.) supporting a rogue government (Israel), then that is your/my problem because we refuse to become impoverished.
That is fear and quite understandable. We’re not heroes. Many of us can’t even bake a decent loaf of bread, let alone search and occupy free wifi hotspots. Furthermore, our ideas of poverty are often formed by what we see in depressed sections of cities where imagination has died from legislated annihilation—your tax dollars denying preventative health wisdom, guaranteed housing, employment and joy avenues, while covering the full retirement pension and prostate surgery for a three-star general killer of innocents.
Poverty can be very creative. In fact, it needs to be in order to thrive. One must become a full-time accountant, handy-person, butler, maid, beggar, dreamer, aristocrat of the spirit… It takes a lot of awake-time hours to avoid vicariously murdering children half a world away. Though it can be done. We were twenty- somethings not so long ago. Have we forgotten that a hand-to-mouth existence was doable? We were more open to love, more tolerant, more just. And poor! No insurance, no car payment, no mort(death)gage(pledge), no prospects actually, until they came under official contracts with endless caveats to obey.
One big contractual double-bind: We must work to eat and afford shelter, however our labor is pick-pocketed every payday by federal and state governments. A 1.5 trillion dollar portion of the people’s earnings are set aside for the federal government to, among other grotesquesly violent maintenances, allocate bunker-busting (school and hospital annihilating) bombs for Apartheid regimes, and corrupt state treasuries to fund governor junkets to racism.
I don’t like it one bit. I don’t want to be responsible for ethnic cleansing in the Middle East. The only non-violent way I can think of, in order to free me of the burden of contributing to the massacre of Palestinians, is to get poor, and quickly. Israel is killing 160 kids a day, and they’re using U.S. shrapnel weaponry gifted from the White House and Congress to achieve their satanic goal.
So I’ve opted to figuratively divorce my wife until a ceasefire is intiated and the majority of Israeli, Hamas and U.S. governments stand in world judgement like Goebbels at the Hague. Rose (my wife) isn’t ready to live with a joint income under $19,000, which is the poverty line for couples not wanting to buy in the double-bind of taxes to support foreign ethnic-cleansings. However, I can begin to scrub my conscience clean while managing a single life earning under $15,000/year.
Here is where the creative living ideas need to come alive and thrive. Fortunately, I am a competent cook, so I won’t starve. Brown rice is a nutritious and affordable base for meals. Divorcée Rose has offered me a room in the garret and 20 square feet of studio space for $150 a month. But I’ll still need an income, and painting isn’t cutting it. Today I offer my services as handyman, landscaper, cake baker—whatever chore I am capable of, I will do for you for minimum wage, transportation time included (it might take a while to walk to your house). Under-the-table pay of course. Under the killing table. If I can live like a cheap monk, while simultaneously loving Rose to live how she feels she wants to, then I can at least pretend the killers aren’t extorting a dime from me. I’ll live below the poverty line, a $15,000 and under lifestyle. That’s $1,250 monthly. I won’t partake in the same benefits of money that Rose gets into. I’ll bring a flask to bars and fill up on dry cereal before sittng down with her at restaurants. I’ll make birthday gifts like I used to when nobody expected me to receive more than I could consume. I shall walk more than drive, yet account for every penny when I perform the latter. While figuratively divorced, I can charge Rose for certain tasks that lie outside normal nuptial responsibilities (such as replacing a furnace filter outside of the garret), or foregoing rice and lentil dinner to prepare Chateaubriand and capers in the salad at her (paid for) request.
How I will proceed:
• I have $1,000 saved from painting sales to use as start-up money for the single income.
• Get some under-the-table work.
• Continue to hawk paintings.
• Account for every penny earned and spent, a veritable Poor Ronnie’s Anti-Ethnic Cleansing Almanac.
• Ask Santa for a stainless steel flask.
It might be nigh impossible, but I’ll try with might and main. I just met with my pretend lawyer. Rose needs to sign some papers…
I have been thinking on this volunteer poverty concept for quite some time. From my 2011 New York Times best closet-stacker, Moonlight in Groundspruce Woods:
Poor is Power to the People
Now how should we behave toward our distant, far away leaders? Our government torturers in Washington stuff bananas up the holes of hostages. It should be time now, don’t you think, to torture our government? Nobody wants to get caught disobeying our parents, the scout leader, the shop teacher… We know that after having all that “against the rules” fun, the principal awaits us in his office to act stern and grave and perversely sadistic. Scary thought, torturing authority. All the money and power is on its side.
What tortures governments?
Easy. A massive constituent rise in monetary impotence. Citizen withdrawal. Limp spending. The majority population can opt to live below the poverty line for their remaining years on earth, and our government reluctantly supports its black sheep flock.
Multiple millions cashing in their EIC checks for their childish transgressions of ease and contentment. No more budget with your name on a bomb. Once poverty is yours again, all worry and complaint about government behavior turns into gossip. And if the political landscape gets darker because your potential brothers and sisters in poverty were too terrified to forego cable television for nirvana, the principal might deserve a powerful smoke bomb to detonate when he stops by the classroom to challenge your soul. Maybe just a cold cock will do.
True, no puny (however wonderful) life alone will shield blows of government superpower paranoia. “They have vays of getting view to talk.” A fruit-stuffed colon being one of them. Pushed up by the scaredy-cat stoolies of a faceless bureaucracy, who make tearful oaths to constitutions, yet obey the rhetoric whims of political millionaires and billionaires and their old men general mercenaries, the latter who disguise prostate agony with attractive medals and decal stripes forged and sewn by the lucky poor of China.
No. Human beings will never en masse to voluntarily choose poverty. The innocent and determined few can and should, if only for the joy of temporary sanity. The poor are not guilty for torture, pollution, injustice, nor even the poopy-scat culture melting our brains. Only the most overtly evil leader would electrocute his nation’s children for the innocent crime of poverty. Unless of course some of these unfortunate brats of bad taste are Jewish, Muslim, dark-skinned, or in any way cumbersome and blocking the path of prosperity for the caretakers of their glorious governments.
It is time for the wise to get quiet and poor.
Poor and unseen. Pretend timidity and anonymity, and torture your government inconspicuously.
Quite an undertaking. I’ll try to think up some handyman chores to assist. Problem is, like Rose, I have a resident handyman already. May the New Year find you thinner but feeling less guilty.
Good to hear—re:guilt. I agree. Playfulness and refusals are effective. If only the masses would join in. Boycotts work when everyone participates.