As a child I considered myself patriotic. Shortly after arriving at school, we would stand attentively, hold our hands over our hearts and dutifully — and sometimes passionately — intone the familiar phrases of the Pledge of Allegiance.

The memory seems quaint. I recall my childhood peers and I doing this in concert, every day. Strangely, this was the -only- thing accorded such seemingly reverent repetition in our common routines. I say seemingly because repeating some words every day may seem reverent, and could even be. If they held noble meaning. Or if they referred to something real and true, or sacred.

These words did not. Not because they could not. They fully held the capacity for the nobility they postured.

It was because the nation they referred to was evolving. Not into the beautiful bastion of human hope, education, and liberty that was advertised, no. Not into the nation one might truly feel pride in having a role in.

Into a nation of lies.

A nation of rapists masquerading as heroes. Of bullies pretending to nobility. A nation of thieves and sickening con-artists whose advancements had to do primarily with the consolidation of power and the subjugation of those they were entrusted to nurture, protect, serve, heal and represent.

The fact that some few heroic souls remain and serve within this ongoing catastrophe we call America is here noted. But their acts will surely be overwhelmed, attacked, and forgotten, if they themselves are not killed or destroyed or imprisoned outright. That there are noble persons is not in question. But our lives and future require that the bodies of consensus our cultures produce are actually noble, and that their presentation generally accords with their activity and intention. And this we do not have.

Without it, we shall be prey, and so, too, our nation, our parents, children, world, and future. Even, yes, our history.

All this shall be prey for parasites. Because that is what we have allowed to become established in our name.

Modern America is neither a Democracy nor a Republic. It is, approximately, a prison-factory. A seething, rapacious nest of parasitic nightmares, whose primary function is to subjugate, attack, imprison, repudiate, ignore, and dominate any being, place, or way not in supraordinal compliance with their agendas.

This is our nation.

And as a participant in this nation, however forgotten or denied, I am still committed to the principles I understood it to be founded upon. How unfortunate they have not yet been embodied here.

Perhaps, someday, they shall.

09.11.2012.