FSA Origins Project
The Diary of El Unico
Vol. 1, Recovered 2037.05.23
pp. 8-10

Let me say at the outset, I’m nobody’s revolutionary. In fact, I’m the anti-revolutionary.

I never wanted to be anything more than middle class; that’s as high as my dreams ever extended. To say that our family’s poverty, my own poverty, was the central focus of my childhood, and much into adulthood, would be a gross understatement. No one who examined the streets that slithered out from “downtown Olneyville” – a slummy, former-mill town section of Providence, Rhode Island, gone bust – could even say that it was blue collar; that would be an exaggeration. In 2000, 88% of the births were to unwed mothers. My time predates that, but I can’t be bothered to look at or develop statistics or metrics for an argument: I lived it. Anyone who disagrees will have instantly admitted they’ve never lived there.

The Woonasquatucket River and its tributaries split Olneyville and the surrounding areas into its constituent neighborhoods. When the mills had been operational, it might well have been charitably called working poor; a collection of neighborhoods of factory workers, mostly whites, some immigrants, and a few blacks, all trying to claw their way to the respectability of the working class. You’ll find no commies among the poor, but plenty of envy and discontent. Oliver Hazard “Don’t Give Up the Ship!” Perry Middle School was like the DMZ between the predominantly black Hartford Ave Housing Projects and Silver Lake, with the surrounding streets a constant tumult of ours and theirs, of wops and micks, of your mother and dumb polack jokes, of niggers and spics… hell, we even had some chinks, too.

My mother once said of my father – simultaneous compliment and indictment: “He’d give a stranger the shirt off of his back… and leave us with no shirt on ours.” She loved him, but he bounced jobs as whim suited. He was gregarious and talented enough to find new work, with his family along for the ride to make due until “things got settled.” It was a big reason for the divorce. Mom knew she could make it better economically, even with two kids, than she could with my father in tow.

It’s not exactly the type of stuff that provides for galvanizing manifestos or slick propaganda pamphlets. My military service is probably a wash, in that regard, too. I enlisted and scored well enough on the ASVAB and GCT tests that they moved me into communications. Comms. That’s what got me the TS/SCI and other clearances. Radios had been encrypted for a long time and serious military comms included increasingly sophisticated encryption.

Communications describes the process of sorting signal from noise. Of wheat from chaff, as it were, and it interested me…

This is not the stuff of revolutionary legend. A lot, but certainly not all, of historical revolutionaries have been a part of a military, in some form or fashion. Like most of them, my service was unremarkable. I enlisted in the Marine Corps as a way out of the grinding poverty – and accompanying stupidity – that runs rampant in ghettos and working-class neighborhoods, less so in the lower middle-class communities, and even less so as one moves up the economic ladder. The police – I feel compelled to note for my revolutionary creds – get increasingly polite and responsive, and exponentially less belligerent as you travel up that economic ladder. The cops don’t kick in doors in upper middle-class neighborhoods looking for blow, whether residents are white or black. When you have that much green circulating in property taxes, the cops are more than happy to keep the riffraff out and not lean too hard on the – ahem – constituents. Broke kids living in the inner-cities learn this very early on in life; the cops in those ‘hoods know you don’t belong there, white or black. The only difference is in how long it takes them to know: if you’re black, it’s near instantaneous. If you’re white, it’s about 5-10 seconds after they’ve stopped you and started asking what you’re doing there. Usually ends about the same way, too.

This was the first of the government’s progressive shibboleths I went after. I showed – I sent a clear signal – that put the lie to their white supremacy nonsense. I showed that if indeed ‘systemic racism’ existed, it would best be placed at the feet of the people who held power – and I named names. But what does that mean? No one ever forgets great memes, but one rarely, if ever, knows the author. By then I wanted to burn the whole fucking thing down, so I signalled accordingly; I was going to need an army.

*     *     *     *     *     *     *     *

It started out simply enough.

I made datasets and comparisons of congressghouls who were responsible for – i.e. voted in favor of – particularly awful pieces of legislation. I also pinned dates to the cries of “systemic racism.” I plotted data and I made graphs. I did the worst of all possible things to bureaucrats, governmental flunkies, and their midwits in the Media: I did Math. Very, Very, Good Math.

Of course, when I first sent that signal, it went out into the ether, beamed and un-responded, un-remarked upon, completely unnoticed… for years. The clowns in government and media didn’t know what I was saying – they’re innumerate and barely literate. It would be the beginning of my blasphemy, but by no means my greatest, against their Gods.

I once watched some fantasy-history tv series about the Roman rule of the British Isles. Britannia, I think it was called. I can’t say much about the historical accuracy of any of it, but on thing they got right: the Roman general charged with subduing the unruly and local pagan population made clear to his staff that success would only be achieved if and when the Roman army destroyed the local populace’s Gods. Someone nailed that.

I told every single one of the people that ‘joined on’ in the early days what I was about… unfortunately, sometimes circumstances force you to take allies where you can. And then it doesn’t matter how pure your doctrine, nor how clear your motives, the next thing you know, the government coverage (i.e. the media) is reporting breathlessly on your ties to white supremacists and SUSPECTED NEO-NAZI SYMPATHIZERS!! I even consorted with known Climate Deniers…(!)

This from the same people who were simultaneously claiming they could forcibly vaccinate Americans with an untested, experimental vaccine. Or their secret FISA courts with no due process for someone accused of being an Enemy of the State. I looked around and saw that We, the People had everything – and worse – that the original Revolutionaries stood up against: no knock warrants, secret courts with no due process, domestic spying on Americans, taxation used as a weapon against political dissidents, indifferent courts stacked with elitist judges, stifling of free speech and opinions contra the ‘official’ line, increasing infringements on the right to own a weapon (the only thing that ever kept a government from rolling over its citizenry)… And on and on.

We had the whole of the list of grievances.
Lockdowns, Part Trois, anyone?

I feel fortunate they purged the military of all the wrongthinkers over the vaccine nonsense, too. I didn’t at the time because it branded the courageous, shamed those who would stand up to them, identified who was a threat… but – conversely, it also ID’d who the future political officers and military komissars would be… and I made sure we got those databases, too.

PWND, Komrade. All your SQL are MINE, motherfuckers. I’m fighting the omnipotent, all-seeing Government-with-your-Alexa-recordings as the Eye-of-Fucking-Sauron. Ed Snowden didn’t get even get to the good stuff.

I imagine… sometimes, when the revolutionary fervor comes over me – that I’m simply coming to grips with the same thing our forefathers did. I don’t imagine that they much loved the French, but they sure as shit took their money, arms, and men against the British. Oh, sure, the French were far more fashionable in the 1770s than they are today, but even then, there were as many leaders who disliked the French as there were francophiles. But the fight for independence was dead in the water without the French, and fortunately the Froggets wanted to see Great Britain suffer for the French humiliation after the Seven Years War.

So… maybe I’ve had to take aid and comfort from some evangelicals, and conspiracy whackadoos and other sects, in order to stay out of the dock. It’s not as easy to hide in the digital age. I can’t just go into the woods of Appalachia for this fight.

?I do declare there were times when I was so lonesome
I took some comfort there ?

Being a martyr and freedom-fighter isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.