By Anna Von Reitz
Your whole life you have assumed that you are a receiver. This is because from the moment of your arrival in the conscious flesh, people have been transmitting to you. Relentlessly.
They have "helpfully" defined who you are, by giving you a name, a race, a religion, a political party, a nationality, a social class, a membership in a family, an economic status, a birthday, a weight, a backstory of ancestry and history, a language, yes, a total identity.
And it's all donated. You didn't choose any of it. You are furnished secondhand, like an abandoned house.
Your place in the pecking order of the world and the microcosm of your family is made abundantly clear to you at a very early age, and from this hodge-podge of incoming information, you deduce who you are and what you are.
At the same time, above and beyond this initial processing, you are increasingly exposed to the Loud Voice -- the internal dialogue that runs ceaselessly in your head. This seems to be your voice, your internal dialogue, but is it?
Closer inspection shows that this, too, is a broadcast mish-mash of sensory impressions, communications from others, commercial and political advertisements, rehashes of earlier material recalled, and a pervasively negative evaluation of you and your performance in life.
Against an ever-changing backdrop of standards donated by society at large, your Loud Voice measures you and finds you wanting. You aren't tall enough, you aren't small enough, your hair is unacceptable, your academic performance is insufficient, and so on and on and on, and you get caught up in what your Granna calls, "the Chase".
This is an endless pursuit of perfection as defined by Unknown Third Parties, who also provide you with a timeline of development standards and duties. You start Kindergarten at five years of age, graduate from High School at eighteen, finish college or a four-year trade school program at twenty-two, marry the same year, have a child by 25, and so on and on, mid-life crisis at forty, flabbiness sets in at fifty, and by 65 you have half a dozen chronic, incurable, but very expensive health conditions....you have become a Cash Cow to be milked by the pharmaceutical corporations, hospitals, and healthcare providers til the end of your days.
It's all scripted, and you are more or less compelled to be a character defined by someone else in a story dictated by someone else according to a plot line someone else decided.
By this ineluctable and largely unconscious process of programming and barely veiled external threat enforced by peer pressure, social shaming, and a host of authority figures who maintain control: parents, school officials, military instructors, job bosses ---- all possibility of having a life of your own is largely rendered moot, and somewhere in the grey area beyond 65, where until recently, most people were allowed to die in peace --- many people wake up with a life half-lived.
Add some music, art, fashion, culinary creations --- and the sum total of all this is what passes for "culture".
This is the truth. Look at it. Your Granna isn't wrong about this. She has observed it closely throughout her life, and although she was roguish enough to bypass a lot of it or to redefine it after-the-fact, she has lived it, too. She has faced all the programming and indoctrination and stifling demands that you do.
What is most notable at the end? That a surprising percentage of us did not give up. We resisted. We held out for something bigger and better than a game of shuffleboard on a cruise ship as our grand finale. We fought for sanity and individuality and the rights of God's unique creations and always knew -- surely without being told -- that there is no such thing as a One-Size-Fits-All life.
It's the quiet rebellion of these retirees, marked by refusals over the course of their lifetimes, that is your inheritance.
Each and every one of them remembered how to say, "No.".
They said it for you, for your sake, when you were too young to say it, and before they had a clear view of the landscape themselves. They acted on instinct, a deep knowing that told them that whatever it was, was wrong. It didn't smell right. It didn't feel right. It didn't make sense.
So as you go forward, know this --- your inheritance is based on one word: no.
Everything that is dear to you, everything that is worthwhile, everything that matters in this world that has been however painstakingly preserved for you, has its basis in a refusal by prior generations to accept something other or less.
Remember that they said no, often and vehemently. They said it quietly, or they shouted it from rooftops, or they joined hands and chanted.
This Memorial Day, remember the beautiful rebels of every prior generation, who had the strength and good sense to say no to violence and greed, disrespect and insanity. Remember those who stepped outside the Daily Indoctrination, who didn't get married at 22, who didn't aspire to look like anyone else, who didn't fit the mold, who followed their hearts and who honored their own truth and discovered their own conscience.
Beyond the grave, beyond the limits of human endurance, they are still speaking for you until you find your voice and speak for yourselves.
Granna
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