Kyle Bennett
Government is Bad

1. We don’t want to turn your government anarchist.  That makes as much sense as accusing you of wanting to dye your hair “bald”.

2. We get it, there’s no historical precedent. That tends to be a common problem with new things, yet new things are created every day.

3. We don’t expect utopia. If you think that’s what we’re after, maybe it says more about your idea of the function of government than ours.

4. Some of us live with our parents, and maybe even have a room in the basement. Some of us are parents.  Most of us are just adults with lives not too different than yours.

5. Arguing on facebook is not how we think we’re getting anything done, it’s what we do in our spare time. It’s what we do to connect with each other, to exercise our ideas before applying them out in the real world, or just for fun.

6. Convincing you is not important to us, except in an abstract or personal sense.  You’re probably not as important as you’d like us to think you are.

7. We’re not seeking consensus, nor to sway the masses. The requirement that our lives be ruled by public opinion is one of the things we oppose.

8. We’re not the ones breaking Starbuck’s windows. We like coffee too.

9. We’re not trying to mooch off the system, we want to be free to produce for ourselves the useful things the system produces, and to do it better.

10. We’re against a lot of the same things you are, and more.  We value most of the same things you do, and maybe more highly. It’s our means that are different. When those values and oppositions come into conflict, we don’t make excuses, we resolve it.

11.  We’re not nihilists.  We’re for a lot more than we’re against, it’s just that the main thing we’re against is so overwhelming it blots out the view of everything else.

12. Solving problems requires work and time.  We’re not the ones with illusions of having our wishes fulfilled through documentation and edict.

13. We don’t blame you for creating the system, but we’re amused by how obviously self-fulfilling your prophecy that “we can’t do anything about it” is.

14. We don’t want a violent revolution, we want billions of peaceful ones.

15. “We” are neither a monolith nor a collective. We’re not defined by our label, our label is a recognition of the overlap between our individual beliefs. Extrapolate from it at your own risk.