I wish I didn’t know what I know about our rulers.

So I am having a mental break right now.

I worked on a political campaign this past month, for a guy running for our seat for congress. He reflected the politics of our district, and mine pretty well. Good guy. I wrote some articles for him and sent to local papers, door knocked, and passed out flyers at polls for hours. I spent probably 30-35 hours volunteering and had a few beers with his campaign manager. We knew we wouldn’t win, just trying to get to the runoff.

In the end, the guy with the most money and a famous name got 60% in the primary and we got around 12%. It didn’t matter what he’d said in any debate, or anything else. We had a lot of volunteers but he had the internet ads. Money won. I knew it usually did (like 98% if the time) but it’s different when you are actually putting your time and energy into a campaign, only to see it fall because a few bundlers and PACs bought someone else. It’s a physical reaction of disgust.

I not only participated in my party precinct convention this year, I ran it as the chair. We voted on resolutions to push them up to the state senate district convention, but I now know none of that will go anywhere, because I’m not part of any of the local “cliques” of good ol boys who decide who gets on the local party committees. Technically I can just request to be on one, but they find ways to exclude you from the process.

So I’m having a personal crisis. No matter what I do, I’m impotent. Our democracy is a sham and we’re all living a lie. If Black Rock Capital decides it’s good for business to pull Grayson Billings from inactive reserve to send him to Ukraine to eat a bullet because freedom and democracy, well by god I’m going and there is nothing I get to say about it. Because they’re part of the nobility in this new techno-feudalism and I’m not and never will be.

I have no real say in who rules over me, and when I attempt to express this, I’m either a conspiracy theorist or just nuts. No one wants to believe our political system is a sham, so they don’t. They listen to their propaganda box every night, telling them what they want to hear, whether that’s boomers watching Fox or millennials watching Stephen Cobert, and I’m crazy because I know they’re all lying.

It’s all a giant joke and it’s be funny if the well being of billions of people didn’t hang on the decisions of about 200 billionaires and bank directors who are so very convinced of their own brilliance and moral rectitude. But I know the dark truth: it’s that the rulers of the world aren’t any smarter than the average person, they just believe they are. In reality, they’re monkeys playing with anthills, there is no final judgement, life is pain, and I just want to forget I have seen any of this.