If they tell you that if you just cooperate with them now, that they will feel gratitude, it is absurd to believe them.
If they tell you you are safe, it is stupid to believe them.
The only protection is a functioning system of government with police protection, and/or the physical ability to protect yourself.
If the psychopaths fully take over our government, nowhere is far enough. Nowhere is safe. You can be found on a remote island in Fiji, or the jungles of Borneo, if they want to find you.
And self evidently, no identified dissident can move anywhere in this or any other developed country freely. As I keep saying, this is the big and obvious lie in futuristic dystopias, like, say, Minority Report.
They have facial recognition and gait recognition. If you disguise yourself, you will stand out because they can’t identify you. License plate scanning has been robust for years now. You can’t go anywhere on any highway that you are not known quickly, if someone is looking.
Disappearing is getting harder, and harder, and many highly intelligent people are using the cover of preventing terrorism to make it functionally impossible, at least for people outside the System. Right now, it is mostly accurate to say there is nowhere to go.
So every cooperation in the direction of giving these people what they want is ultimately futile. Once they have what they want, they can turn on you with impunity. If they win, good people lose.
There is no point trying to delay the reckoning. If it is going to come, it will come, and you won’t be able to sidestep it. There is no escape.
I do think about moving to another country from time to time, especially when I read about how corrupt our nation has already become, how much control and surveillance is already in place, how corrupt, particularly, the FBI and CIA already are, but then I think: it is here, or nowhere. Now, or never. If I lose here, I lose here. There is nowhere to run, that I can see.
This place, this country, this time: this is where good people must make their stands, make their voices heard, rat out their corrupt supervisors or underlings, tell the truth to courts, enforce the laws honestly even in the face of fear. There is no other time. There will be no other place.
This is my gut feeling. It is an astonishing feeling, to feel alive in such a time. But life has always been odd, has it not? It always ends. Everything we build always crumbles. Everything we were is always forgotten. We all have a last breath, perhaps with a last thought, as we go on to what comes next, if there is something which comes next.
And not knowing what comes next, if something comes next: that is an extraordinary thing too, is it not? We have not solved this problem. We can’t even figure where and what matter is, and so logically cannot say anything truly final about what it means to have a body, to occupy it, to use it, to express it, and to leave it, in some way.
If I might quote Madonna, in a ludicrous change of tone, Life is a Mystery. It truly is.