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(I wrote the following almost three years ago after finding out that a friend from my school years had passed away unexpectedly. I had a vision of this world as an much happier place, and of possibility that is all-too-often denied or unrecognized by the cult-collective mainstream “opinions” of the “status quo.”)

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A girl I went to high school with died last week. She passed away in her sleep.
I always end up thinking at these times, I wonder how much time I have left? My family? My wife. Oh and God forbid my only son. My little boy. And sometimes I feel a feeling of fear and of a very pronounced and dreadful anxiety, as if a dark cloud hangs over everything.

Have you noticed the looks on people's faces, in day-to-day life? The absent-minded, hurried expressions of "If I don't get this and this and that other thing done now, oh I!" There's a kind of weird unspoken pressure and anxiety that hangs over everything...saturates everything. We feel this anxiety. Most people, at least it sure seems like it to me, live this way, with a few bright flashes of the real expression of their human capacity for joy here and there, and then we die.

Taxes. Jobs. Pressure. Fear. Fear of what? Some vague unnamed thing. Always hanging just beyond us. Looming. But what? Fear of being poor. Fear especially of social stigma or ostracization. Fears of being found to be on the other side of "the law." Especially if you are moral. Immoral people are not afraid, because this kind of stigmatization, only negatively affects those who have a moral code in place to be repulsed by the application of such a stigma and to fear its consequences to their moral, more distant goals.

Can you see the taut, nervous smiles? The timid, too-eager agreements made in the interest of "self-preservation? The all-too-often smashed down actual opinions held by beautiful and unrepeatable human beings....just to become a mush of nothingness in the pathetic and insipid acquiescence of a gray office? Am I part of it? Are you?

I think to being a kid at my grandma's.
Green grass. Red tractor parts big and bulky in the green grass. Bug barn. Playing in the weeds and catching bugs. Making things. Shocking ourselves on the electric fences. Peeing outside. Swimmimg. Building forts and mini-homesteads. Checking the nature books for whatever specimen was found that day when we came back to the trailer at night. Taking a nice, warm bath to wash of the filthy mud and dirt. Eating ice cream in a clean shirt and underwear before bed. No taxes. No goddamned laws. It was much easier then to feel the world was generally a safe place governed by logic and reason. The expression of joy was simply a natural and even the central theme of actually being alive. The whole meaning and root cause of everything.

Now. What if the law were abolished. All the threats of violence against the non-violent. All that guilt and stigma from those who would craft "moral opinion." I felt that childlike sense of possibility driving home from school today. I could feel it. And see people with joy in the town. Without the cloud. People living. Not just feeding their organism to sustain it's daily cowering under anxious false premonitions. The "law" was gone and was replaced by the natural law. Chaos was not there anymore but there was spontaneous order and many cheerful faces makes things and not living like a half-asleep fear machine feeling sickened with each self-denial.

I saw adults in my head living like children, and children like adults. The homesteads were no longer imaginary, but real, and created, maintained and improved with joy. The children were studying from an intense desire to know. Not to repeat answers. There was no vague yet oppressive sense of anxiety, or fear of mythical, unjustly assumed authority by a class of individuals called "police." We all became human, with the right to self-defense, and the defense of the innocent. Police existed, but voluntarily, as businesses subject to the supplies and demands of the free market.

No more meaningless chaos.
Death to be finally embraced as a part of a life well spent. I will remember my friend from high school as a warm and smiling face.

They wish to and do, steal from us our lives that we have here now, but the sad part is, it is made possible, at least in part, by our own voluntary agreement to their falsehoods, and false premises. By our acceptance of their moral code.

There are new inventions to be made. New ideas to be seen. New explorations. Shame on the cowards who have stood in the way of the children's life force. And I would say shame on me for believing them, but the shame is the only tool they have against me and you. We are already there.
We hallucinate their little pony show to be something other than a fraud, and ourselves to be deserving of it, and so it continues.

We all know the things that really matter.
Reason is still alive and reason stil exists.

To my friend's children and family, God bless you and I am really sorry for your loss. I am certain that the radiance, kindness, and freedom of spirit the one you have lost brought to the world has made, and will continue to make a big difference in so many ways.

~KafkA

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Graham Smith is a Voluntaryist activist, creator, and peaceful parent residing in Niigata City, Japan. Graham runs the "Voluntary Japan" online initiative with a presence here on Steem, as well as DLive and Twitter. (Hit me up so I can stop talking about myself in the third person!)