I was an 80s child, and I remember riding in the car with my parents and seeing a drug store and being confused: by that point I’d practically been pummeled by the moral message that drugs are Bad and we must say No to them. I asked my parents, who said that actually, drugs aren’t intrinsically good or bad, it depends how they’re used.

I don’t remember exactly the questions I asked or how they were answered. It was a long, long time ago. But I know it ignited the horizons of my naive mind to learn that sometimes the voices of authority were wrong, and sometimes they were deliberately lying to me.

That was just a tiny moment in one child’s life, but I think we have all experienced a series of similar revelations in the last few years. We’ve witnessed firsthand the rotten, gluttonous, blood-gorged American empire grind away uncountable human lives in order to maintain a rapidly decaying status quo. We’ve seen and cannot unsee that even the devil we know, the lesser evil, is unabashedly genocidal.

I’m looking for the middle way. I’m looking for a strategy that will keep me in the game and simultaneously deconstruct the game’s objectives and mechanics. No easy task: every decision has grown so complex, and the complicity so subtle. I don’t know to what extent I may succeed, only that I have to try. Anything else is unacceptable to this naive child’s mind.