Max's Problem

Frustration.

My problem, my frustration, comes from feelings of powerlessness and futility. I start my day off listening to The World Today on BBC World Service. Then I listen to the news on Radio Česko. The news is always bad and I always leave my house in a depressed state of mind.

I try to resist buying a newspaper on the way to work. I have just heard all the news and I don’t need to re-experience it. But if I don’t have a book or a magazine with me, I end up buying a paper anyway. What the hell, the magazines I read are full of bad news anyway, and I don’t read very much fiction anymore, so books are not much of an escape either.

Then I get to work and I am sitting on my fat arse in front of a computer all day so I can indulge my addiction to news through the medium of the internet. That is the worst, of course, because on the internet I am not limited to mainstream news. On the internet I can read the libertarian news and the anarchist news and understand that there are other people out there that realise what’s going on, but still it all keeps going on.

Today I found an article by Paul Craig Roberts called Can Anything Be Done? In the article, which I hope you will read for yourselves, Roberts describes being attacked (verbally, I mean) by readers because he doesn’t trust our government.

That is the whole thing for me. We were taught at school and in our homes and in our churches or synagogues that the US government was a good and honest government. And it seems that most Amerikans go on believing that throughout their whole lives. All I can say is, What the fuck?!! Can people really be that unbelievably stupid? Can people not find a way out of their childhood delusions? Well, Max, I say to myself now, you have the answers. The people in The Amerika really have been brainwashed to that extent. And that is why some days I have no hope at all.

The closing line of Roberts’ article: “Government got free of our control when we forgot the teaching of our Founding Fathers that government is always the greatest threat to our liberty.” And there you have it.