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Tomorrow
by L. Neil Smith
[email protected]

Attribute to L. Neil Smith's The Libertarian Enterprise

I remember what the future used to look like.

Maybe you do, too.

For the most part, in what were called the "Sunday Supplements" of America's daily newspapers (or the decorative endpapers of some of my favorite "Young Readers'" books), it consisted of crowds of healthy, happy human beings, men, women, and children, colorfully but lightly dressed for their weather-controlled environment, inhabiting glass and silver cities shining in the golden sun, swarmed about by tiny private aircraft, levitating automobiles, and individuals hurling themselves through the air on jet-pack harnesses, while an atomic-powered flying wing passed by overhead, and a V2-shaped rocket ship blasted for the stars.

That was the brilliant future I was looking forward to, when I was a little boy, lying on my stomach on my grandmother's living-room carpet, with the Sunday funny papers spread out before me, a future of teardrop-shaped 300 mile-per-hour passenger cars and people staring at slightly bulky instruments strapped on their wrists, asking, "Can you see me now?" That was the bright tomorrow I expected to be living in today.

And I wasn't the only one.

But something went terribly wrong between that time, 60 years ago, when Disneyland was shiny and new, and the drab, gray, soul-smothering present.

Political ambition, fanned by near-absolute power the state had wallowed in during the World War II began acquiring new and terrifying weapons.

Government began generating multi-billion, and multi-trillion dollar programs pretending to solve problems—poverty and a high rate of violent crime—that government had created in the first place.

Undeclared wars, hideously expensive in money, lost time, vanished opportunity, and wasted lives and talent, were illegally prosecuted in every far-off corner of the globe for no other reason than to enrich the ruling party's mercantilist cronies and suppress Constitutional rights.

At home.

Corporations were paid lavishly, with wealth ripped savagely out of that future we all looked forward to, to supply the politicians with things—strategic bombers, nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, intercontinental ballistic missiles—none of us wanted and nobody needed.

For a long while, conditioned by the mostly groundless fear that America might end up smashed, as Europe had recently been, by an all- powerful enemy, people were persuaded to pay enormous chunks of their children's flesh for a smoldering "cold" conflict and possible nuclear "exchange" with the Soviet Union—as if that were really going to happen when leaders on both sides were growing more powerful and richer every day. It was history's most gigantic and egregious con-game, and once the Russians—who had less wealth to sacrifice to gullibility and greed—went bust and skulked away from the poker table, the players who remained scrambled around for a new game to play.

After a long train of mostly unsatisfying substitutes—the drug war, projected energy shortages, air and water pollution, video games—they finally got what they wanted (in fact, following Franklin Roosevelt's example, they probably custom-ordered it) on September 11, 2001.

What none of these parasites realize at the moment is that, for better or for worse, it's the last con-game. The 8000-year-old Age of Authority—of shamefully unquestioning obedience exhibited by our parents and grandparents, the so-called "Greatest Generation"—is over.

The Age of Authority is over.

Terrified by a general population better informed of events—and their rights—thanks primarily to the Internet having turned human communications sideways, and better armed than any before in history, the power-addicted idiots who think they own us continue to pass new laws, decree new edicts, to rumble and threaten and scheme, as if the ongoing revolution is merely a passing fancy, instead of the most significant corner ever turned in the affairs of Americans and the world.

The Age of Authority is over.

This week, Barack H. Obama, the country's first openly Marxist President, quietly signed an Executive Order giving himself the power (of course he lacks any right or legal authority) to "commandeer all private communications"—meaning that he thinks he can shut off the Internet which he and every politician like him hates, loathes, and despises.

Even though the Age of Authority is over.

If it delights nobody else, this edict will make Hillary happy, She and her repulsive husband dreamed—and spoke openly—of doing such a thing all eight years that they inflicted themselves on us. Jay Rockefeller will like it, too. He wishes the Internet had never been invented.

But the Age of Authority is over.

What will actually happen, of course, is that, in one form or another, the Internet will continue uninterrupted. It has now become the nervous system of a planet that has evolved past its resemblance to a jelly-fish, and is rapidly becoming a chordate. With no apologies to Carl Jung, it is the genuine collective consciousness of the human race.

The Age of Authority is over.

Evildoers in government (but I repeat myself) are wholly dependent on the Internet, too. And stopping it would require shutting off the entire telephone system. What's more, there are people working, right now, to free the Internet of the phone system and find or create new media that even a madman can't shut off. Obama doesn't seem to have learned the most important lesson of our times: never fuck with the geeks.

The Age of Authority is over.

And so, the President's sneaky edict is most likely to end up on the growing trash heap of laws that people won't obey and powers they won't respect, exactly like John Hickenlooper's cretinous and unlawful firearms legislation in Colorado. All that any of these drooling simpletons would have to do to stay in power until they retire is publicly rededicate themselves to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and then stick with it. Hell, they could even make a big ceremony of it, to be held on the anniversary of either of those documents, or both. But they're too stupid for that, and they won't. So the mostly self-directed evolution of our species will pass them by.

Because the Age of Authority is over.

We're not out of the woods yet, by a long shot. The thing I fear most is that, once they're fully aware that history has taken a new course, to a destination that has no place for them, they will react with the same savagery as they did in Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam—or Hiroshima.

In case I haven't made myself clear, I believe broken creatures like Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Charles Schumer, and Diane Feinstein wouldn't hesitate for an instant to use nuclear weapons on their own people (of course they don't see us that way; to them, we're just unruly cattle) in order to stay rich and in power. You can see it plainly in their "finest" works of art. While we imagine gleaming cities of the future, what they seem to crave and adore is East Berlin in the 1950s, Beirut in the 1980s, and Detroit in 2013. Everywhere they go, they wreak destruction, crime, poverty, and death.

They call themselves "progressive"—as in metastasizing cancer.

The Age of Authority is over.

I want my future back. I intend to get it back, too. For as long as I continue to live, that is what I'm going to work for, without hesitation or compromise, to the very limit of my time, energy, and health.

The Age of Authority is over.

Would you rather be like the "Greatest Generation" who believed and obeyed some of the most evil personalities in American history, or like the Founding Fathers, who offered their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor in order to drive criminals like that from the continent?

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