Seeing what we cherish become fodder for the lust of Progress makes fate an easy mark for our righteous ire.
Bad luck is the low hanging fruit we pluck from the vines of apathy. But to heed the calling of a dissident life, one can suffer no such indulgent escapism.
Instead, we work. We create. We make things. Fix what needs fixing. Grow what needs growing. Build what needs building.
One thread of wisdom borne through the grace and glory of hard work is the fact that nobody is coming to save us.
This is a feature, the goodness of hard work.
We here at Dissident Rags find this truth to be liberating.
When the creeping anti-reality of those who would have us enslaved in lies became too much to set-aside, we began with one simple thread: to share our creations with fellow dissidents.
From that one thread we took up the task of stitching this modest tapestry of who we are as dissidents to life.
We build our own stories.
The dissident man may find himself standing among the ashes, but he wastes no time lamenting what once was. No, he starts sketching the foundation of his future in that new frontier.
We here at Dissident Rags are part of the generation that got to see some version of America before progress set out to remake all that was good into some beastly chimera of Diversity, Inclusion, and Equality (DIE).
So, we know some of what was lost firsthand.
This is a gift - and a curse, that drives us to hold those things dear, but also to accept that the past is indeed a foreign country.
Meanwhile, we are still too young and too driven to simply retire to the cabin to read the greats under the amber glow of rendered buffalo. To burn the days in idle contemplation between pulling rainbows from the eddies.
So, it seems there are two ways about it: surrender to the inevitable under a warm blanket of bread and circuses, to "get mine while the getting is good", or to reject the yoke of progress entirely and take up the good work of the dissident.
And so here we are. Making little bits of art while building our stories for the campfires of tomorrow.
After all, in the end, we win. Providence!
- DISSIDENT RAGS