OWS etc.

NOW it is coming on like a revelation that governments are in bed with corporations and all is not well?

The entire state is founded on corruption and crime. Warfare and theft of lands from, dare I say, sovereign nations is a fundamental economic policy of our capitalist state. Every single day the economic sanctions of capitalism are killing off people around the globe and little is recognized here in Canada. And then there is the torture and the genocide and the use of nuclear and chemical weapons, a few of the more obvious vulgarities of our nation we barely concern ourselves about.

Our government is not legitimate, not in any conscionable sense. It's legitimacy is derived through force, at the end of a barrel of a gun. You do as the government tells you, or it crudely steals your property or throws your body in jail. It matters not whether you are right in the most just sense of the word.

So what do we do to make it all run, this machination of criminality parading itself as legitimate government? We pompously herd ourselves down to the polls and endorse the regime. And we turn over a portion of our earnings each year which continue funding its economic and barbaric crimes. For this is what we, the 'good citizen' does, do we not?

It matters not in our society to be accountable to something more than an imposed Constitution contorted hither and yon to serve the purpose of the state, or to something more than books of fable which have long lost their essence in our times.

We don't seek to think clearly, concisely or honestly with ourselves. We don't desire to dig too deeply inside lest we find out what we are all about. Our participation with the government through our vote and our labour makes us complicit in the crimes of state, it does not absolve us from those very crimes,

If we believe that we are more than farm animals, that we were not born simply to satisfy the greedy needs of the government farmer know as state. then we need to individually start acting like more than animals. We need to lead through our humanity. Only then can we live freely and be a good neighbor.

It is not a man's duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support. If I devote myself to other pursuits and contemplations, I must first see, at least, that I do not pursue them sitting upon another man's shoulders. I must get off him first, that he may pursue his contemplations too. See what gross inconsistency is tolerated.

~ Henry David Thoreau, On the Duty of Civil Disobedience (1849)