As detailed in the introduction to
Cities of the Red Night, by
William S. Burroughs, just prior to the establishment of large-scale colonies on the American continents, there were a series of so-called
pirate utopias along the
Pacific and
Caribbean coasts. At least one of these was founded on principles very similar to those enshrined in your US
constitution, but it only lasted a short time before natives overran and destroyed it.
You can't do this any more, but I want to. America was founded on "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," and I hate the country for betraying it so completely.
You're born into it, you're told you're free, but you don't have the freedom to opt out and try to do better yourself. The land's all taken, the rules are all laid down, and there's enough comforting bribes to make sure that only those possessed of some overriding ideal ever even want to break out, and there's too few of them to have the power to do anything.
Leastways, that's the theory. Everybody I speak to hates the way the world is going. Here in New Zealand, people my age (19) can just about remember clean air and beaches and a time when the waste of the rest of the world didn't force us to cover ourselves up just to avoid cancer. It hurts my fucking skin when I expose it to direct sunlight. Humanity has the scientific method, the historical sense, the understanding of how it all works (or rather, an idea of how to figure that out), and the only people using it are the people who got fat off the way things are. Yes, weathervane, they've learned from all the revolutions that have ever been, they've learned that the hardcore idealist revolutionaries like Jefferson ("I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man") are the only ones who will revolt simply because it is right to do so. The rest will only revolt if you fuck with them overtly, enough to actually seriously piss them off. D'you think the coonskin-capped settlers and southern slave-owners revolted for an ideal of freedom? D'you think the office drones or the crotch potatoes or the Ivy League will ever decide to simply become more free?
What our rulers have learned is how to keep people from caring about the big things by burying them under a swarm of small things.
For me, anyway, small things just aren't enough any more.