Freedom is a Virus

I always walked with my right foot leading me. “Right is always right” my father said that to me once and it somehow stuck. When I hike, I always take the right forked path, in videogames I pick the right path up the tower of monsters, it doesn’t matter if it’s not the path with the least resistance. “Right is always right,” I say to myself, inheriting my father’s words of wisdom.

Over time, I learned how to be everything that he wanted or at least what I thought he wanted from me. I don't think most people love me, they love versions of me that I have spun for them like Arachne before Athena turned her into a spider. Versions of me they have constructed in their minds. The easy versions of me, the easy parts of me to love.

I recollect a conversation I had with my brother. I recollect arms around me, a fight was it? Or a brotherly embrace? “You think too much,” he said when I told him about myself. “Why hold onto all that?” He said it as an order more than a question. Either way, his embrace suffocated me. I don’t want to hide it anymore, I want to drag it out to the streets and force everyone to look at it.

“Ageh majority free houk, tarpor minority; can’t expect it to be the other way around.” a friend told me once. So, I ask you when will it be our turn to be free? When you’ve wiped away all traces of the previous regime, or when this country has workable metro lines that don’t crack your head open as you’re going to work, or when your home is not set on fire by an angry mob, or when your two year old is not crushed by an earthquake within an unsanctioned building.

You see how ridiculous this is, freedom is not a reward for being good, nor is it something we can give exclusive rights to one group of people to first. Freedom should be uninhibited, like a virus, it should have a domino effect. Freedom for you, should be freedom for me. If you still don’t want my freedom, at least get to know me and I can’t do that with a political speech or a long-winded monologue. The best I can do is to show you my life and tell you there is no reason to fear it.

“To educate the masses politically does not mean, cannot mean making a political speech. What it means is to try, relentlessly and passionately, to try to teach the masses that everything depends on them; that if we stagnate it is due to them too, that there is no such thing as a demiurge, that there is no famous man who will take responsibility for everything, but that the demiurge is the people themselves and the magic hands are finally only the hands of the people." -- Frantz Fanon from The Wretched of the Earth (1961).

Life gave me love and I made life out of it, you can call it what you want, but it won’t disappear. My head hurts but my heart knows the truth, I’ve remembered how to laugh again in spite of you. I’ve become irresistible to the people I want to be irresistible to. I know that love is the only thought and pain is the only feeling. I know that everything will work out for us, we will occupy spaces, we will make sounds, we will go absolutely crazy.

We will think thoughts that will be thoughts, we would have never imagined we could think. Not in any past or any thought of ours could ever reach, but thoughts whispering the first glimpse of the future where somebody, maybe you, maybe not.

But some kid on a high rooftop, some kid wondering whether or not to jump, but decides at last that the only thing left to do is dance. You can dance with us after you’ve taken that flag out of your ass.

Happy Victory Day!