My First and Last Time in Political Activism

by Angelo Mike 

Exclusive to STR

March 5, 2007

I did a very stupid thing today that I’m hoping you all can learn from so you don’t make the same mistake. I thought I would experiment with what I should have realized would just be an illusory, narcotic high.  

I went into my neighboring socialist nightmare, Washington , D.C.  Upon entering the hateful, angry, and ugly city and finding my way through its horribly constructed and decrepit roads and buildings, I went over to the Omni Shoreham hotel, where I thought I might actually have any influence on who is elected to enslave our country.

What I walked into was unlike anything I’d ever seen. I entered the hotel with my seven year old Nike sweatshirt, khakis, and what I considered to be a nice t-shirt into an army of people dressed like they were at a funeral. It’s only in working out my distress while writing for Strike The Root’s readers right now that I realize these people actually give a damn’s worth to see their criminal try and win a presidential straw poll over my criminal.

I know what STR’s more experienced readers are thinking. You’re shaking your head, wondering how I could prostitute myself like this. You’re asking, “Don’t you have any respect for yourself?” I can assure you all that today’s events have taken an emotional and spiritual toll, which is a painful but curative process which I realize is for my own good.

At least let me say some things in my defense. First of all, I never intended on voting for any office candidate in an actual election, ever. I was merely going to today’s straw poll to express my support for Ron Paul, who I think can reach others with his anti-state, pro-freedom logic. And I believe people are susceptible to it. They don’t know what they’re missing until they’re exposed to libertarian ideology. When you live your whole life under the thumb of the state, you don’t know that you’re under the state’s criminal control, just as we don’t think about air until its quality changes or it’s gone. You merely become aware of the state’s kind of oppressions when you are introduced to different variations of it.

Second of all, I didn’t even vote. I walked in to the registration area, saw the $25 fee for sticking around for three days when I only intended on voting and leaving, crumpled up the form, and walked out.

That’s when the noxious aftertaste of what I did hit me. All these people were standing around, pitilessly campaigning for one candidate or another. All this effort was being wasted for their hero worship bullshit when, after the great efforts of these armies of followers, whose only message is to boost morale as pathetic little creatures of the moment, even if they accomplish exactly what they set out to do and get their candidate elected, everyone is made worse off for them having done it.

And I, however well intentioned, added one more unit to the madness.

For anyone ever considering any kind of political activism, don’t. It’s like a guilt-ridden one night stand. I walked out of there having been corroded by the toxic influence of democracy. I was even induced to be anti-social to others. I walked by someone who just mentioned to me what a nice day it was out. I turned around and shot a dirty look at him, then went on my way, asking myself, “What the hell’s wrong with him?”

D.C.’s atmosphere wasn’t helping. I walked down the street past some hideous buildings, horribly designed intersections, pothole and congestion-ridden streets, and went down the 150 foot metro escalator, which gave me vertigo.

I also admit that I’m another victim of circumstance in hating the state. For my city of Arlington is a relatively free one, despite the heavy liberal influence. My hatred for socialism and evil grows more and more in between my visits to D.C.

Every one of these trips makes it all the more heartbreaking to see how these lives are wasted either being prostituted for some criminal politician’s plan to force everyone else to live how he wants and attract more people to support him. These people are the homeless, insane, and physically invalid population who struggle to live there, and who are pretty visible anywhere you go.  The cops you can see on virtually every street corner, giving D.C. among the highest, if not the highest, per-capita cop population, yet still consistently battling it out with Detroit for having the highest murder rate, and a population so infantilized and hedonistic, a society so eroded by legislation, disarmed by the police, all while D.C.’s leaders arm the military to kill anyone they want and threaten the world with nuclear war, that you can see in the eyes of its residents how their souls are crushed by the state.  

I had a high school teacher who once lived in the Soviet Union . He said that when you looked around at people’s faces, they looked dead. They didn’t think. They didn’t have an education or imagination to think how they could get out of their misery, and that progress is possible. Their families were and still are broken down, and their abortion rate is among the highest in the world.  

Yet we pride ourselves on being free compared to those undemocratized brutes in countries such as Russia or North Korea , where the political class lives better than the vast majority of the population. People flee these countries and can now find socialism right here in my home.  

I was only in direct contact with democracy and socialism for a matter of minutes, yet already I am worn down and dispirited. It’s sad that most of these people won’t get off the narcotic high of being able to invade the rights of others by a ballot, stop, and think soberly about what they’re doing.  

I’ve hated D.C. for virtually all my life, thinking that the socialists there deserve what they get with their crime, hatred, ignorance, political power, moral decay, lack of security, and poverty. I hate every time I have to go there. But that’s because when its government is so heavily involved in thwarting the plans of its citizens, it was very easy for them and myself to see the population and their government as one.  

D.C. has made a class of victims worse than the status of prostitutes. These people are bullied and coerced, have their property taken and lives directed by the state, and they don’t know any better. They can’t. They uncritically live with the state like we live with air. No substitution of one kind of government or another will help these poor souls. Only society, property, and peace can show them a complete alternative to government.