If I were to lay in bed for the next twenty years, and to then rise, I would not have much strength in my muscles to do the activities I once enjoyed.

I might collapse onto the ground, with my poor quivering atrophied muscles shocked by the sudden immense force that they have been called on to exert in this untrained state.

If I trained every day for a week, I might be able to get out of bed again. If I trained every day for a month, I might be able to go for a walk again.

It’s going to take some doing to work through that kind of rust, and to train yourself out of that kind of neglect — but if you know that going in, maybe that little bit of effort won’t be so bad.

You’ve done harder things. There was a time in your life, early on, when you spent every waking hour for about six months trying to figure out how to just roll your body over. You were also working on learning other tasks at the same time. Imagine how simple that movement probably is for you today and how hard it once was. Good-Bye Germ Theory: ... Trebing, Dr. William P Best Price: $36.69 Buy New $14.00 (as of 04:04 UTC - Details)

For a year, maybe a year-and-a-half, you tried your best to figure out how to balance head atop neck, atop shoulder, atop spine, atop hips, atop femur, atop knees, atop tibia, atop ankles, atop all those little movements in those cute little feet and toes that it took to keep you balanced that first time you let go and stood, and then dared to take a step. Why’d you do it? Because it felt as natural as walking out into the fresh air and feeling the sunshine on your entire face. Just feels right, this thing we call freedom.

To this day, you still probably trip and fall from time to time. Balance and coordination are a lifelong endeavor. Many efforts are a lifelong endeavor that not only stop growing, but atrophy, and even die if neglected.

Would the most innocent, lump of happiness and love that makes up a child ever sabotage her own growth, her own progress, her own advancement toward being a full, free and capable part of this world?

I’ve never heard of that child.

Then what would cause any adult to do that? Somewhere along the way something changes in some people.

It took you about two years to learn how to grasp a thing as simple as a pencil, and another two years of work before you could bring any precision to the process, perhaps even longer. To this day, you probably still have to work pretty hard, if you’re going to operate a pencil with much precision.

I’m not asking you to do anything that hard at all, nothing as hard as the work it took you to learn how to operate a pencil, which when you think about it is a pretty amazing accomplishment. Compared to all the thousands of challenges like these, that you’ve worked so hard at and accomplished, this one is a walk in the proverbial park. Jabbed: How the Vaccin... Wilcox, Brett Best Price: $13.02 Buy New $13.05 (as of 03:50 UTC - Details)

For twenty years, the average and above-average American alike have been laying in bed, ever since those planes hit the World Trade Center and government said “Go to your room. We’re in charge now.” It can be no surprise that some muscles have since atrophied. The emergency they said they were handling never came to an end. The terror alerts never stopped. Some people never stopped talking about them. To this day, I don’t know what those terror alerts mean or why they matter, and not for the life of me do I care.

People have tried to explain it to me, perhaps not realizing that I stopped listening to them about twenty seconds before they started explaining, right around the moment where their tonality shifted away from the “I-am-telling-you-something-sincere-or-original” voice to the “I-am-now-delivering-a-preprogrammed-message” voice.

We still have alerts. We still have security at airports that touch passengers’ private parts “for the safety of all.” We still have a two decade unending war. We still have an even bigger military with all its parasitic appendages that a United States president and general once called the “military industrial complex” in his farewell address on January 17, 1961.

He knew that topic better than anyone and appealed to the American public on national television about it, yet today it is a conversational topic relegated to those pejoratively deemed “oddballs,” which is exactly how some special interest groups would like it to be.

Because of the failures of many, a generation ago, in their own lives that allowed security theater to be commonplace in America, all the leftover nonsense of the last twenty years are problems that remain today as temporal and qualitative taxations on daily life. But some people do not comply. Some refuse to lift their hands in the “I surrender” pose.

The Politics of Obedie... Etienne de la Boetie Best Price: $7.00 Buy New $7.00 (as of 05:45 UTC - Details) They have not been laying in bed twenty years. Their muscles are strong. They have not neglected to fight the fight that so many others ran from. Consequently, these people who stood up twenty years ago and continue to do so to this day, have felt little of the tyranny that is American security theater.

People like that saw the goofy face mask order on the horizon and laughed: “You think I’m scared of an unenforced face mask order? I stared down low paid, poorly trained, uniformed TSA government thugs from 2002 to 2020 who were told that they were the front line in the War on Terror and that I must be a baby killing terrorist if I didn’t comply with their every word. And I did that during 40 trips each year, both ways. You think I’m scared of this face mask hype?”

People like that aren’t scared. They’ve been building their muscles. They’ve seen some of the worst this country has offered its citizens over the last two decades and have survived uncowed and unscathed.

What happened to everyone else?

You may have been one of those who stayed in bed. Perhaps you’re ready to start working those muscles again.

“If you’re like me, you want your heroes full-throated and unflinching,” writes the full-throated and unflinching Becky Ackers.

I don’t expect to ever see her in a fear mask. I don’t expect to ever see her lining up for a Bill Gates approved anti-viral regimen. I don’t expect to ever see her complying with the government’s “mandatory” recommendations.

Some days, dozens of people write me to tell me their stories from the corona compliance checkpoint. Boy does that give me inspiration. It inspires me not because they aren’t wearing face masks, it inspires me because I know they are 1.) identifying their boundaries, 2.) communicating their boundaries, and 3.) defending their boundaries.

That is an applicable skill in the face of any request from government, from an employer, from a customer, from a spouse, from a thief, from a parent, from a child, from a friend, from anyone.

It’s not just about government. Government is not to blame, but you might be.

It’s about being honest with yourself and with others as you live your life. There is no freedom any other way. Even though they may not be stated the exact same way, all attempts at freedom succeed because they focus on this principle of identifying, communicating, and defending personal boundaries.

I’m happy when I hear these stories because these stories are bigger than masks. These stories are about people building their most valuable muscles in ensuring their individual freedom.

Yeah, I get it, it’s also about masks and exemptions and valid reasons to be able to stop hiding in your house, and why you shouldn’t be scared to exercise your valid exemption (as I’ve written here , here, here, here, here, here, here and here). Anyone Who Tells You V... Coleman, Dr Vernon Buy New $3.99 (as of 04:06 UTC - Details)

The millions of Americans with valid exemptions get to rise up, each morning, thankful for the condition that they may have once felt was a disability, because in this moment they are able to advance and defend human freedom in their own lives in a way that so many others are afraid to do without the law on their side, and it’s about so much more too.

Because in that process, you really have a chance to bulk up those muscles.

I pity the fool who isn’t taking that chance.

I don’t know what the future holds. No one does. But some of those necromancers, charlatans, and algorithm buggers claim to have a crystal ball telling them their future. They are saying pretty clearly what their plan for your future is.

It’s a scary future they describe.

I know quite a few people who won’t take part in that future, because they’ve trained every chance they could, every day they could, for many years of their lives. I know others, many others, who are new to this all, but who won’t take part in that future because they’ve been training every day that they can, every opportunity they can, since the first time someone told them to wear a fear mask. Some may have even had their change of heart this very moment.

They laughed: “You want me to do what?”

And then they never did that thing that was so foolish an idea that they laughed out loud at it.

That’s real life training — perhaps the most vital training — doing what you want, and not doing what you don’t want to do. It’s honest. The deepest honesty may exist in disobedience. The two are not antonyms, no matter what virtually every authority figure in human history would have you believe.

Those who walk through every retail door they want as a paying customer, and every church door they want as a parishioner, and every space they want as a visitor, and figure out how to do it without the mask — even if they only start demanding that standard for themselves starting this moment — those are the ones who won’t take a vaccine. Those are the ones who will know their boundaries, know how to communicate their boundaries, know how to defend their boundaries, and consequently, will be ready for whatever comes next. Master Manipulator: Th... James Ottar Grundvig Best Price: $14.15 Buy New $17.78 (as of 05:25 UTC - Details)

They aren’t saying to themselves “I’ll lay in bed six more months, and if it’s really bad then, I’ll stand up for the first time in twenty years.” Some people, unfortunately, are telling themselves that exact fairy tale as they press the snooze button and roll over, getting comfortable with everything happening around them.

I don’t know what comes next.

You don’t know what comes next.

But I know the tools I need to be a free man in this world.

And do I ever feel lucky to be able to train with them so much this year.

A pope once wrote “Let us thank God that He makes us live among the present problems. It is no longer permitted to anyone to be mediocre.”

I like that.

Who’s with me?

Send me your stories from the face mask compliance checkpoint and help me put an end to this tyranny.

The Best of Allan Stevo