You’re never too old to ditch out
You’re never too old to ditch out.
You worked… You were fooling yourself. No big deal. You still have another chance. Today you are protesting to keep your pension once you’re sixty years old. You don’t want to work anymore. But you certainly did your share of work. And you waited for it to go away, you waited for it to pass. Finally it did pass, and you passed on too.
If today you’re in your sixties, you would’ve been in your 20s in 1968. You saw and knew that other worlds were possible beyond the one that’s been built up around us with your participation. But you forgot that, or at least you pretended to forget it. You acted like working was a dignified, tolerable, interesting, or simply the human thing to do. The generations that followed after you mimed your resignation, or, to put it more grotesquely, your enthusiasm.
You have a second chance now. You know in your flesh that you don’t want to work anymore. That in the end you only worked because you were forced to, and some of you know that you gave yourselves the necessary illusions. Leave those illusions of yours behind now, if you still have any. It’s time. You’ve got the means to do it. Sixty years old, and you’ve certainly not dried up. The government, domination – they are terrified of you in a way… They’d like to reenlist you for another five years, until you’re really totally emptied out. Before they release you back into nature.
The managers of society fear you. They’re scared that you might ditch out, since you’re still alive. You’ve got the means to do it. Maybe even more than you had when you were 20. You have the means to desert, to ditch out, to renounce your adherence to the social order that’s consumed you. Deserting means: organizing the conditions of the flourishing of less mutilated relationships than those that commodity domination commands us to have (the growling hostility, the systematic incomprehension between men and women, the absence of any true community, intimacy, or friendship, the prohibition on violence, madness, suffering, etc.).
You have one last chance to not betray yourself – to live, finally. And it means abandoning ship. In one sense it’s our last chance. A world going down the drain wants to ensure everyone that it won’t go down alone. It wants to drag us along with it into the abyss. And it’s ready do do anything it needs to in order to prevent and annihilate any social secession. However, that’s the only adventure open to us now that really draws level with life.
Chaos will be our General Strike.