This Is My Rifle: The Story of a Middle Class Rebel Posted by Jason James on 05/09/12 | Filed under Features, Opinion, This Is My Rifle, Politics

Recently somebody asked me why I'm so concerned with American politics and the negative impact of western financial interest and corporate influence on the rest of the world. Since nobody had ever asked me that that question before I was caught off guard by it. I had always thought that it would be an easy question to answer, one that I could respond to with a simple yet airtight explanation. But when I searched my mind for the right words to justify my personal investment in the dark side of human existence I was dumbfounded.

Truth be told, I live a good life. I have a job that pays a well above average salary and I work with a great group of people. Every week, Monday-Friday, 8am-4pm, I am a national purchaser for a major cellular retailer. I have 6 vendors under my control (soon to be 7) and I spend my time within the corporate structure. There are many perks to my job but I most enjoy my free cellular plan (I definitely do not miss my phone bill) and access to any handset I want (I’m currently running on a Samsung Galaxy Note with no plan to switch anytime soon). It's because of my job that I've found a higher sense of freedom when making music and for the first time in my life I no longer worry about what will become of my artistic ambitions. No, I haven't begun the creative death march towards being comfortably content (I'm still as obsessive compulsive as I ever was), rather, I've reached that long sought after creative space where commercial appeal just doesn't matter to me anymore and as this next album is taking shape I can honestly say that I'm making music for myself. If nobody ever buys one of my albums that's fine, I'm perfectly happy with giving the world a piece of my legacy every few years for free as long as inspiration will allow it to happen. I'm on my way to a beautiful future with an incredible woman, the bills are paid and I've found my artistic stride. What more could I ask for?

All things considered, I don't have much room to complain. My life at this moment in time is the very definition of the middle class utopia, so why bother gazing into the abyss below me? I should be looking ahead into the horizon; kids, minivans, camping trips, baseball games and all of the other tiny pieces that fall together to make life the wonderful experience that it is. What's the point in setting my focus on the aspects that I have no control over?

I'll never forget the morning of September 11th, 2001. Prior to this day I was an 18-year-old kid with little to no concentration spent on anything other than girls, parties and music. But as I sat alone in my living room in utter disbelief as a pair of massive commercial jets slammed into the World Trade Center I was confused as to what exactly it was that I was bearing witness to. Having been a child during the first Gulf War, and growing up knowing Sadam Hussein as public enemy number one, my only thought was that somehow, some way Iraq had to be involved in this. And as I watched a man leap from one of the top floors of tower 2 in a last ditch effort to escape the intense heat of burning jet fuel, I felt a combination of anger and sadness fill my heart, a flood of emotion so powerful that it stayed with me for weeks.

Still to this day the image is seared into my mind. A man that I never knew, or could even recognize if I were to see his face, in his final moments atop the World Trade Center, trapped between the sky and a building engulfed in flames and on the brink of collapse, having to make the decision whether to wait until the floor crumbles beneath him or take fate into his own hands and free fall to certain death. Just the idea of the immense hopelessness and despair that must have overcame him as he realized that he was never going home is inconceivable to me and something that causes an overwhelming sadness to well up inside me. After witnessing this man's closing act of desperation my life had changed forever.

In the months that followed, the story that was being told by the media just wasn't making sense to me. I tried to accept that it was a simple case of a malignant foreign entity that struck a devastating blow to the United States that day but something inside of me wouldn't believe it. There had to be more to it than that. There's no way that a rag tag group of jihadists could just walk onto four planes armed with nothing but box cutters and forcefully take control of 100+ Americans. The probability of that actually happening, in my mind, was beyond a 0% chance.

So I began to search for answers and during my search the world as I knew it completely unraveled around me. One book would lead to another, then to another and so on and so forth. As the years progressed the old reality melted away and a new one (the real one) started to take shape. I now understood who and what made the wheels of the western world turn and that same intuitive spark that wouldn't let me abide by the official story of 9/11 was evolving into a raging fire. The more I learned, the more I became disconnected from the program that we're all plugged into.

I know that most of you reading this see words like "New World Order" and "Illuminati" and scoff at them due to the ridiculous notion that there's some hidden "legion of doom" group of individuals sitting around a table in a dark room somewhere, secretly plotting against us. Believe me, I know how stupid it sounds. Whenever somebody pulls me aside and says, "What do you know about the Illuminati?" I brace myself for a longwinded rant from some fruitcake who spends way too much time on YouTube and lives in his Mom's basement. But what Spaceman Spiff, sitting next to me raving in my ear about reptoid aliens and magic computer chips, doesn't know is that he's closer to the truth than most of the population.

Call them what you want; The Bilderberg Group, Trilateral Commission, The Ford Foundation, Bohemian Club, Freemasons or even (and I hate this word) the Illuminati. What I can tell you I know to be absolute fact is that these people do exist. These men, this elite class of wealthy bankers, control every aspect of society; media, religion, health care, law, politics, and most importantly, finance, and they manipulate them at will to pull the strings of the unaware masses, herding them like sheep to the slaughter. They are the small group of billionaires that sit in the shadows, far removed from public view, and write our history while the rest of us are but minor players in a script perpetually unfolding on the world stage.

So I guess I fight it because I know how this story ends and I refuse to curl up and die. While I do want the kids and the minivan, I will not allow for my future children to be slaves to a secret group of psychopathic perverts. I cannot turn and look the other way while the aforementioned abyss grows deeper and threatens to swallow everything in life that is important to me. Yes, I have achieved things that I never thought would be possible, but I can’t bear to fathom what will become of it all when the well of happiness inevitably dries up. I share this information with you not because of some ego driven mission to prove to the world that I’m intelligent and/or significant, but because I truly hope that all of you reading this will see what I see and get out before it’s too late. We are on a path to destruction and we desperately need to come together and alter the space that we’re in. This is a crucial time and we are reaching the breaking point. We need to wake up NOW.

I just hope it doesn’t take another 9/11 to make that happen.

(Jason James is an artist, freelance columnist and writer for RefinedHype.com. You can listen/download his most recent album, "Marvelous World Of Color", here and you can contact him here and here.)