In our culture, we have a romantic notion of dying for freedom.
I am not asking you to die for freedom.
I am asking you to stand up in calm conversations.
That is all that is asked of you.
There are no bullets flying.
There is no shrapnel.
No one is going to be taken as a Prisoner of War. No one will go Missing in Action.
None of that is needed.
Yet in the era we live in, most people can literally be more content dying for freedom than looking a grocery store manager in the eye and calmly saying, “I realize it is your policy, but I will not wear that mask, and I would still like to be served.”
That apparent contradiction deserves further inspection. Why is it easier for some to die on a battlefield than to do that, in daily life, which is comparatively minor and mildly self-effacing in the name of liberty?
But Don’t Stop There. Take It Further
While you are being served, at that same grocery store, or after you are served, it will grow your muscles for face-to-face truth telling, if you do not whisper some anti-mask slogan under your breath, and then just walk off, but if you plant your feet and continue by saying something like this instead — calmly, but firmly, non-aggressively, but directly:
“And, by the way, don’t you feel ashamed of yourself for still continuing this charade? The mask does not work. Do you realize that?”
Pause for every question to be answered. Do not hurry through. Make this moment count. Make every moment count. You have a chance to speak truthfully and stand your ground, rather than being the passive-aggressive soft-talker that society wants you to be, before going on your way and sulking, which is what society would like to think you evil anti-maskers do when you are not in the public eye. It is hard for the most obedient to imagine you as anything but a malcontent and misanthrope, yet you are quite the opposite. Continue with those questions and make every one of them count:
“Do you realize that? Let me ask you a question — have you seen the Fauci emails? He emails people saying the mask does not work? That’s what he was writing when he thought we would never be able to read his emails. Fauci says it does not work. You realize that, don’t you? So why are you still wearing this? You would comply with anything, wouldn’t you? You would do anything they tell you, wouldn’t you? Let me ask you this — Why are you still enforcing this? How much is too much? When will you finally tell them you have had enough lies and to stand up for yourself? Do you have children? What do they think when they see you unwilling to stand up for yourself? Unwilling to stand up for them? What do you think that does to them to see such cowardice from a father? What do you think your bravery could mean as an example in their lives? Or are you just going to let this go on forever? And for them to get even worse of a deal than you got? Is that your plan? Is that the world you are going to leave your kids? Is that the example you are going to be?”
Expect an answer to every question.
That Approach Is Not A Bad Approach
That approach is not a bad approach at all. It takes guts to do it the first few times, but then you realize what authority you command when you do something as simple as speaking the truth.
It becomes harder to see a man as a misanthrope when he asks such questions that cut to the soul. Many who hear you will have no choice but to feel the genuine care you have for others as you push that issue. You cease to be the black and white, flat figure that society needs you to be in order to vilify you. You let words of humanity out of your mouth, the very humanity society seeks to deny all in this era of corona communism, and which it especially seeks to deny those who will not go along with the narrative of the health mandates.
And There Are Other Approaches
That is one approach, and there are others. There is the “invoking an exemption” approach that I have often written about, and which can really be used effectively to open doors, to the point that no one can legitimately claim to be forced to wear a mask anymore. That is a good starter approach, a good “training wheels” approach.
Yet still, most people can literally be happier with the thought of dying for freedom than even using the truthful training wheels approach from my bestselling book Face Masks in One Lesson, which can be as simple as saying, “I am unable to wear a face mask safely.”
And that is no lie.
It is evident that no one can wear a face mask safely at this point. This approach is simple and effective, especially when used in a phone call before showing up to a store. Many thousands have successfully used this.
Even making a phone call is harder for many people than obediently dying in war. That has been my experience with many of the people I have encountered since the Ides of March 2020.
Today, as I write this, is Memorial Day in the United States. Let’s dig into the strange phenomenon of showing one kind of bravery, but not another — battlefield bravery but not daily-life bravery.
The Following Is Easier For Many
The following would be easier for many people: 1.) Be drafted into a war that “everyone” is in favor of, 2.) If you say “No,” you know that your sweetheart will look at you askance and that decision will follow you through life for decades, 3.) You hardly have the choice at that point but to go (though in retrospect, quite a few draft dodgers have done well for themselves), 4.) You get broken down as the human you’ve developed into, and 5.) Built back up, molded to stay obedient to your training, 6.) Some of this training helps you after the war, other aspects of it may harm you, 7.) You spend some months, perhaps years in a war zone, learning to more diligently follow orders and to learn to negotiate risk and reward in a way that most people never have had to.
There is so much momentum, built up around this process, that it is hard for many to say, “No!”
Am I seeking to belittle the deaths of service members? Of course not. I just know that the guts it takes to risk life on a battlefield as part of an army, is different than the guts it takes to tell everyone around you in the civilian world to hold the phone, to bring everything to a screeching halt, and to be the jerk in the room doing what is right.
Two Different Settings, Two Different Types Of Bravery
In one setting, you are the hero for following orders. In the other setting, you are the jerk for doing the heroic thing. You are heroic for refusing to follow orders, at least that is often how it works in the civilian world, though few around you can recognize that as it is taking place. Sometimes, those orders are overt: spoken words, signs, decals giving instructions. Sometimes they are more subtle: routine, tradition, whispers into your ear from mother culture.
Both types of examples of bravery — both on the battlefield and in civilian life — require sacrifice. However, not both examples of bravery may be equal at advancing freedom. When you can do the heroic thing in daily life, off the battlefield, in the civilian world, that is where freedom in the world is truly grown.
What Part Of This Equation Reliably Brings Freedom
Whether a war brings freedom is a hit or miss proposition. Whether an individual contributed to that freedom is hard to quantify. The ugly truth is, that often times, war is far more costly to freedom than it is beneficial to preserving or expanding freedom. That is especially true in the lives of those directly touched by war.
In civilian life, it is a different story. In civilian life, just being free, ripples freedom out around you. Being willing to be the jerk in the room and being a stickler for your values can be enough to build your capacity for taking risk. It can be enough to build your capacity to take stands to advance freedom.
Not all war deaths are genuine sacrifices for freedom. That is a sad truth that is not told to many who go to fight to advance freedom. Some return home still bearing that missed detail about war, and help build it into a myth. I have no interest in expressing anything but the highest gratitude for those deaths that support freedom. And I also recognize how it is nearly impossible to live life freely in the civilian world and not spread freedom with your every step.
Realizing that, I recognize how meaningful the moment-by-moment individual decisions in civilian life are at spreading freedom. And I also recognize what a con war is.
How War, A Great Con, Can Build Bravery
War is hell on earth. War brings the greatest evil out of the hearts of men. The most awful, demonic things occur in the midst of war. One moment is so demented, and you think you have seen the worst, most depraved that humanity could ever be, until an hour later, or a day later, or a week later, when you realize you were wrong and that humanity can actually be even more depraved than you realized. I will not go into that further. Those who have been involved understand.
If one slogs through war and returns to civilian life, one is necessarily able to hold their head high. You have slogged through hell on earth. You have seen the worst of humanity. And you lived to tell about it — or more likely, you lived to never tell a civilian about the horrors you saw.
That can build confidence in oneself. That confidence can lead to courage. It may cause all manner of other possible outcomes. But I will ignore those other possible outcomes of living through that hell, and will focus on the courage — courage that can be built from living through war.
“Borrowed” Courage
Courage in a military setting is often borrowed from an officer, from a system, from training, from the sheer numbers of people around you. That is not courage from within you, but it masquerades as such, and once you walk masquerading as courageous long enough, you come to know, quite well, what courage feels like, and it may begin to emerge from within you, especially when you have put yourself on the line a few times and have survived that risk taking.
War is painted as so very black and white. Either you support it or you do not. What a foolish way to see something so meaningful. There should always be things for which a man of courage will take a stand.
Often, that healthy, courageous human response to evil — to take a stand — is manipulated in order to tell all kinds of lies about why a war is good. Sometimes it is promoted for freedom.
Gobbling Up Freedom And Perpetuating Lies
Truthfully, it is hard for any war to spread more freedom than it gobbles up. Even more meaningful, It is hard for any war to spread more freedom than a civilian walking through his daily life ready to stand against evil.
What you do in those moments standing alone, what you do when everyone’s eyes turn to you, what you do when authority all around you is telling you, in the most severe of ways, how wrong you are and that you had better fall in line — what you do in those moments is how freedom is really built.
This is a characteristic of human existence to commend. It is true bravery to be the jerk in the room. Instead, we spend time distracted from that and honoring those who died for causes that don’t often spread freedom. In the process, they died enriching the most unsavory of manufacturers, and dealers, and vendors of death — the kind who always do well in a war. They often do so well in a war, that one may wonder if such merchants of death are reliably the only real cause for war.
A Sad Story
The guy who dies — doing what he understood to be fighting for a value, a value that was in fact not actually being advanced by his death — that’s a sad story to me. It’s a story that more truth telling on a day like Memorial Day can help prevent.
Commending Heroes
I commend those who died for freedom. I commend those who died to defend me. I even commend those who merely thought they were dying to defend freedom.
And who we really need to commend are those who live to defend freedom.
Not just today should we do that, but every day.
To commend those who live to defend freedom must be part of our work.
They do not consider battlefield bravery easier than the bravery of daily life. In fact, they never even consider such a thought. They just live life free, and brave, because they can imagine no other way worth living.
In your life, in your every step, in your every decision, you get to spread freedom around you, or you get to suffocate freedom around you. It takes no vote, no election, no majority, no community plebiscite to achieve that. It takes no army, it takes no officer, it takes no permission from authority to achieve that.
It takes you — a lone individual, perhaps acting alongside other lone individuals, but having that posse is never even needed. Even alone, you have the power to spread such freedom. It takes you identifying your values, communicating your values, and defending your values. Which is to say more generally — it takes you identifying your boundaries, communicating your boundaries, and defending your boundaries.
It takes so little of you. And it is so simple. It takes these small decisions, these seemingly minute details, that such evil men would like to confuse you about. They would like to tell you it does not matter. They would like to tell you that you do not matter. They would like to tell you that your decisions are pointless or even out of your control.
The Authority You Have
Believe that nonsense and you make it so. Take authority in the magnificent creation that you are, and you make that so.
A lie they want you to believe, is that freedom is won on a battlefield, using $40 billion worth of armaments. The truth I want you to know, is that freedom is won in your life, one tiny, almost imperceptible, brave decision at a time.
Some want us to say the face mask does not matter. Some want us to say, “I’ll just wear it to get along with others,” or “I’ll just wear it to get through the door.” If it meant nothing else than that, you might have an interested ear from me, but you don’t, because that’s not how life works. And the face mask would have never been accepted if it were not about so much more.
Your compliance is needed to capture your freedom. Your obedience is needed to develop you into a slave. Your agreement that a lie is really truth is needed to take control of you.
Don’t talk to me about the glory of war when you can’t be bothered to understand the glory of life.
It’s in the process, the day-to-day living, that freedom is won. There is no destination. There is no arrival at freedom. There is no state of existence called freedom. Freedom is the environment you create by acting like a free man.
Every moment of your precious, short life matters. And the enemy wants to convince you of the exact opposite.
The choice on what you believe and how you will act as a result is all yours.
Say no to the nonsense. Push back. Lead. Read the bestselling “Face Masks in One Lesson” (available here) if you do not know how. It is about the face masks, but also about so much more. Read “Face Masks Hurt Kids” (available here) if you do not know why. Signup for the hard hitting daily newsletter at www.RealStevo.com (www.RealStevo.com). Refuse to be enfeebled by the world’s nonsense. You can lead yourself, your family, and the world around you toward better.
