Column by new Root Striker A.G. Fredericks.
Exclusive to STR
“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down in front of a typewriter and bleed.” ~ Ernest Hemingway
It may be written in black and white, but if you search between the lines of The Troy Standard [5], you are sure to find the red stains of which Mr. Hemingway spoke: my blood.
I always wanted to write a book, but the obstacles seemed too daunting to make it worth trying. Traditionally, writing a book was merely step one in the process. After putting 85,000 words to paper, you then had to track down an agent and peddle your work to the publishing industry in the hopes that someone whose job it was to read hundreds, if not thousands of manuscripts would take notice of yours. What was the sense of writing a book if the only people who were going to read it were the publishers, and the most likely result was a file cabinet full of rejection letters?
Towards the end of last year, I came across an article written by noted blogger James Altucher [6]. In it, Altucher describes his experience with self-publishing, which seemed to remove almost all of the excuses I once had. There would be no agent and no rejection letters. No longer does self-publishing involve shelling out thousands of dollars to a printer in return for boxes of your own work that you then have to sell to your friends and neighbors. Now you can prepare a file, upload it, and the publisher will print up a copy made-to-order.
In a world where our liberties and freedoms seemed to be broadly attacked on a daily basis, it is comforting to see how the self-publishing industry is progressing. If you have the time and the inclination to write the words down, you can now be a published author.
And that is what I did.
“Your heart is free. Have the courage to follow it.” [7] ~ Malcolm Wallace, father of William Wallace from the movie “Braveheart”
With the shackles removed, I quickly set forth to accomplish the task in front of me. Armed with a loose framework of a story that depicted my deepest fears of life and a list of hot-button issues I wanted to make sure to touch upon, I went to the typewriter and I bled. Night after night, weekend after weekend.
In the end, the story came together in a manner I never expected – its’ twists and turns were nothing like my original framework. Sometimes when you finally get all of the ingredients in the pot, the finished product isn’t what you expected when you started out.
The Troy Standard is the story of a man, Troy Mulligan, who comes to the realization that he doesn’t like the way he is living his life, and decides to make a change. He sticks to a self-styled daily regimen and turns his life around, all the while he is coming to the realization that the world around him is crumbling [8], and nobody seems willing to do anything about it [9]. He spends his time and money building a safety net for his family, fearing what might become of society should it suddenly descend at a quicker pace than it already is [10]. He invests his money carefully in assets he feels are safe from the government’s reach. He generously donates his time to local food banks and homeless shelters, while simultaneously donating money to projects he believes are making positive strides towards fixing some of the societal issues he deems to be broken.
Eventually, his investing prowess combined with an unexpected inheritance allows him the financial freedom to resign from his job, which he had deemed over-glorified and personally useless outside of the stable paycheck it provided his family. Seeking a more fulfilling path, he is approached by a billionaire with an idea whose time had come: an independent, global, metals-based currency.
“We can either try to fix things now, or we can wait for the inevitable collapse of the dollar. The metals-currency will take hold, if not here then somewhere else. And if it’s somewhere else, then those who live by the almighty dollar will be doomed to die by the almighty dollar… We either control the change by putting the American people at the forefront, or we dither like our politicians and bankers do, trying desperately to maintain a status quo that just hasn’t worked. Those in power see the writing on the wall and they are desperately trying to cling to a broken system.” ~ Troy Mulligan, The Troy Standard
The proposed social protest takes a page out of the playbook of a classic revolutionary – Mahatma Gandhi [11]. In order to change the world, Gandhi used means known as “civil disobedience” and “passive resistance” to achieve goals once deemed impossible. Troy uses his methods in an attempt to bring the currency issue to the forefront. All seems to be going swimmingly, when . . . .
Well, you’ll have to read the rest for yourself.
The goal I set out to accomplish was to write a riveting story that took a regular guy and showed how his train of thought progresses in realizing the dangers of fiat currencies. The book takes a libertarian point of view on many issues such as the expansion of government and government spending, health care, gun control, expansion of the police state, municipality fiscal issues, public education quality, media bias, Internet freedom, indefinite detention of American citizens and hyperinflation.
This wasn’t a book that I wanted to write, rather it was one I needed to write. I was sick of being the paranoid guy sitting in the corner and keeping quiet. I’m sad to say that after completing The Troy Standard, it did nothing to curb my fear of the impending economic and social crisis that we are facing. If anything, it only heightened it.
I find hope in talking to people and try to heighten their awareness of the danger of fiat currency and what might happen under a dollar-collapse scenario. Some people think I’m nuts, but some are starting to come around. And with this book, I hope maybe I can reach out even further – maybe it will wake some people up [12].
