 trapped in the slaughterhouse. Western civilization is a story of full bellies and starving hearts, of a feast of information and a famine of truth, of conveyor belts churning out processed food, conformity-enforcing media, and power-serving culture. Enough food to stay alive, but not enough sustenance to live. They keep us alive, but they don't let us live. They give us enough carbohydrate to turn the gears of industry, but they keep us too busy, poor, propagandized, confused, and crazy to actually drink from the waters of life, to actually experience the beauty of this world, to let the crackling potentiality of advanced terrestrial life blossom to fruition within us. The modern empire rules us by filling our markets with wonderbread and our schools and media with lies, by filling our bellies and starving our souls, by churning out mountains of useless landfill without ever producing anything of real value, by making more while providing less. They improve food production and medicine just enough to lengthen our life spans, only so that they have more life to drain us of. They let us populate the earth with more humans, only to drain us of our humanity. We are not people to them. We are batteries. We are fuel. This is no civilization. It's a slaughterhouse. A fake plastic performance staged to funnel human life into the gears of an insatiable machine. A fake plastic culture designed to keep us on the conveyor belt so that our life force can be converted into fuel for a soulless empire. A fake plastic society built to keep us marching into the food processor. There are so very many more of us than there are of them. We could crush them like an insect the moment we decided to. But the brainwashing is so very, very effective, and the matrix hallucination seems so very, very real. Our propaganda-induced coma keeps us fueling the machine. Not until we awaken ourselves from the coma will our adventure on this planet really begin. Not until we can unplug our minds from the empire's life-siphoning control mechanisms can we begin to really live. We'll either wake each other up or we'll remain trapped in the slaughterhouse.