(Originally written on late December)
My name is Jordan LeDoux. In 2007 I became involved in the Ron Paul grassroots effort, donating on November 5th, and working with Trevor Lyman to organize the December 16th money bomb. Afterward, I enlisted my skills as a web developer who knew just about everything about websites and programming them to the efforts of the Ron Paul Blimp project, working with Katherine Memole and Trevor Lyman again.
At the time, I was 20.
I grew up a rabidly political person, through no effort of my parents. I have been placed in the 99th percentile of every standardized test I've ever taken since I was 6, and I blame that almost entirely on the fact that I find real joy in learning, and love reading. Politics struck me from a very young age as the public expression, the public demonstration, of education. It is the efforting to make very difficult and sometimes unclear choices about convoluted situations and subjects.
That said, I was always extremely conservative. I grew up finding it rather abhorrent how disinterested in learning most of my peers were, and I was utterly convinced that my own effort would condemn me to work extra hard to support their lethargy, and that generated genuine resentment in my soul. As I would discover later, they were not lazy, they just had no hope, no dreams, and nothing to work hard for. I had been taught to believe in myself, and thus had plenty that I felt I could work for.
During the 2000 Presidential Campaign I was in 8th grade and debated my very liberal teachers about why GW was the correct choice over Al Gore. We had friendly banter on many subjects, but my ability to recall and demonstrate factual knowledge was often matched against their hard-won life experience that no facts could ever change. The facts, to me, seemed to support a very conservative view of the world, and the flippant dismissal of my hard-earned knowledge drove me further and further into a "us versus them" mentality that many conservatives find themselves in today (and many liberals for that matter).
But at the core of all my beliefs was the idea that I really, really, really liked the concept of our Constitution. That it wasn't my government which granted me rights, but rather that it was the people out of which all authority wielded by the government was derived. And all of my own opinions at their core came back to this.
I strayed. 9/11 occurred in my first week of high school, and I will never forget what my mother said as I was getting ready to walk out the door to school that morning after getting a phone call from her sister.
"Go turn on the TV," she told me. I raised an eyebrow.
"Which channel?" I asked.
"It doesn't matter."
That response scared me more than anything I have ever heard in my life. I turned on the TV, saw what was happening, and I called my Lieutenant. You see, I was part of the Civil Air Patrol, an axillary of the Air Force primarily concerned with Search & Rescue operations. While talking on the phone with my El-Tee, one of the F-15's stationed here in Portland, Oregon did a flyover at about 0.7 Mach, flying no higher than 2,000 feet. Our conversation on the phone stopped as the plane passed, and when the noise subsided I said with a scratchy voice, "They're flying SkyCap on Portland."
I don't know that someone from a slightly older generation understands just how confusing and scary that day was. It is difficult for me to be this candid, but that event stoked such genuine fear as I have never felt before and never felt since. And nothing that my parents could do to protect me, nothing that my teachers could say or think, nothing that anyone I had as any kind of authority figure in my life could possibly protect me from that.
And so, it was easy, so very easy, for me, with my already conservative leanings, to turn that fear into anger. How dare they? Who do they think they are, attacking such a powerful nation so brazenly? Let's make them fucking sorry they ever even thought to do this. My own admiration for our Constitution had been morphed by this fear into something close to superiority. I knew the philosophicals of our government, and they seemed entirely true, so that must mean that all of our actions represent those truths, right?
I was grossly unaware of just how different America was from her Constitution. I was grossly unaware of how different our actions around the rest of the world are from the professed principals which our society was supposedly founded on.
Everything in my entire life had been a lie. They had sold me idealism so that they could stop me from hoping, from dreaming. When I was a kid, I was taught that I should believe in myself. What I discovered as I became and adult was that I was living in a world where everyone else had stopped believing in themselves a long time ago, beaten into submission by the serial hypocrisy of our own society, which we all feel a part of.
I was just about ready, as this realization hit, and I began to understand just how lost our country was, to give up. Perhaps the moment to save our country from the eventual fate of desecration and defeat from within was long before I graced this planet. But then, by pure happenstance, I received a video on YouTube about Ron Paul, who was evidently running for President.
I had been thoroughly discouraged before. I didn't want any of the clearly fake and pompous buffoons the Republican party was trotting out to be a mouth-piece of a broken philosophy to lead a broken people, and I was equally uninterested in the more principled but less productive agenda of the likewise pompous and deceitful individuals from the Democrats.
Why were both sides trotting out people 40-50 years older than me who were talking with glee about how they were going to make the United States an incredible place, just about long enough for them to die, and then after that my generation was expected to perform some kind of voodoo miracle and "fix things". I had a better idea, how about gutless, worthless, heartless bastards that spent my life before I was even conceived fix it.
I was so skeptical. Surely someone that's been in Washington as long as Dr. Paul can't be serious... there's some kind of ploy here. But alas, I couldn't find any reason to hate him. I tried so very hard. Like many Americans, I felt that finding reasons to hate politicians was perhaps the only right my government felt I deserved, and dammit I would exercise it.
But no, all I heard was... sense. Just common sense. It was as if he were the child in the street, calmly telling the emperor, "but... you're not wearing clothes..."
I was enthralled. I had been about ready to give up on humans. Literally, I was ready to say "no, humans suck and I'm not dedicating any of my intellect to saving a species that is so clearly deserving of utter destruction". But Ron Paul said the same things while reminding me of the whole reason I'd ever felt politics was important to begin with: "well, sure, you can feel that way, but we solved that problem 200 years ago and put it on a piece of paper, and fixing things is as easy as following that".
Surely you jest.
But he didn't. He was serious. And more than being serious, he was right. I joined meetups, I donated money that I truly did not have, and annoyed the living daylights out of my family, all because I felt like this was my society's last chance. This was it. A cross-roads where we were choosing utter despair or solutions.
Through my efforts in 2007 and 2008, I was constantly amazed at how many people were in the same place I was. Without a home in our scripted society. But I was also amazed at how much effort our current system exerted to resist such change.
In the end, I had honestly felt it was our last, best chance. After the 2008 elections, I stopped being involved in the Tea Party as it became more and more a bumper sticker for neo-cons to pretend they knew what they were talking about. They reminded me of those children in school all those years ago, who I felt were hopeless and lethargic.
I began working on myself, spiritually. The world was such a terrible place, I felt that perhaps the only peace I could find was in my own head. And so I did. With several friends of mine I learned how to meditate effectively, and how it interacted with the Christianity I'd known all my life. I became aware of the interdependence our reality places on everything, and I began work on a project to work on a new grassroots campaign. This one would be different, I felt. I was going to try and focus it around a effort to establish a Universal Bill of Human Rights directly with the people of Earth, outside of any government.
But as I prepared to launch this effort, Occupy Wall Street started. It was curious, I felt, that so many people now seemed to agree with a problem that I identified as a 20 year-old, at the time feeling as if I was very alone.
And so I joined them. I threw myself headlong into Occupy, here in Portland of course, and ended up organizing the PR team. I began doing interviews, doing workshops, and I was constantly enthralled. There were genuine socialists that I found myself agreeing with. On the issue of institutional greed, it seemed, no ideology takes a very positive view.
But my efforts with Occupy ended up costing me my job, and now, my apartment. This week I will have to pack up my things, now homeless. I have plenty of skill... I'm a fantastic programmer with a great resume, but these are the times. Ironically, due to the Unconstitutional an brutal eviction of our protest, I don't even have a camp to set up a tent at.
It is with this backdrop that I checked in, for the first time in nearly four years, on the Presidential primary. Shocked. Ron Paul? Running again? And this time even the polls have him as a possibility? Well, I decided, I guess I can forgive my country for being four years late.
I sit now, at my computer, the last day I will be in my apartment. I still don't know where I'm going, what I'll do, or how I'll do it. I'm sure I'll get back on my feet sometime. But even now, as I face homelessness at 24 years old, as I try to budget my meals for the next two weeks, as I try to navigate the absurd bureaucracy of unemployment insurance that tries to keep telling me I don't get anything, and as I try to find reasons for this to be a happy holiday season for me, my greatest wish is for my country.
We are hurting. Corporations that are writing legislation through surrogates are hurting us. Taxation that is neither fair nor representative is hurting us. Suspension of our civil liberties is hurting us. And the myth that the citizen next to you is your enemy because they are liberal and you are not is hurting us.
While you fight with the person next to you, our country is being burned to the ground. This is not a conservative or liberal issue, this is an American issue.
It is our fault! We let it get this way!
We bought the lies, we believed the promises, and when they didn't pan out, we accepted the excuses.
It is time that we give up our naivety. It is time that we give up our hatred for each other and recognize what is really going on here. An entire integrated system is destroying us emotionally, financially, materially, and in every way possible. I thought that the last election was the only chance. I was wrong. This is truly our last chance.
Perhaps if the country does not elect Ron Paul, they truly deserve the destruction waiting for us. This is not time for timidity or talking points. Listen to the man who will tell you the truth, because in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. You may not agree with everything, but here's the reality: there is not a single thing any other candidate will do that you agree with. If you do, it is simply because the reality of what they are doing is well hidden.
It is our elected officials responsibility to uphold our Constitution, and it is OUR responsibility to fire them when they do not. Ron Paul is the only choice left.
