Good advice no matter who you are.

The problem with feminism, as with any other radical egalitarian ideology, is that rearranging the world to fit a political agenda is a poor substitute for dealing with your own problems as an individual.

You know it’s a slow morning when I’m sharing my coffee with somebody who wants to bitch about Amy Schumer. In the course of a long life I’ve managed to learn only two things about her: a)she’s a blond comedian who b)conservatives love to hate. I never caught her act, but probably I’d hate her too.

And yet the sentence above is typical of the unreflective nature of conservative complaints. You know the sort of thing: “Liberals do this, liberals do that,” without ever considering that statists do those things without regard for whether they call themselves liberal, conservative or moderate. I don’t know enough about Schumer to say for sure the quote fits, but it probably does. Trouble is, it’s not just a problem with feminism. Or with radical egalitarianism.

The same thing could be said with profit to the most individualistic freedomista, to the extent that that person is sitting around hoping the political firmament will somehow rearrange itself to encourage liberty rather than chains. Still trying to rearrange the world to fit a political agenda.

I catch myself at it. Let’s face it, we’re heading into bleak and stormy seas, politically…

In which one of these…creatures is likely to become the next president of the United States of America. That’s just weird. And depressing.

And yet, if I may borrow a phrase from one of them – What difference, at this point, does it make? True, at the national level the American political system has strapped JATO bottles to the handcart to hell, and people who are invested in it are going for a ride. But who says we have to go with them?

I’ve tried to talk about this before…

The worst thing about being a freedomista is that there are so many things to be against, you can hardly find time to be for anything.

…and have a hard time articulating it clearly. Probably you’re better off sitting in a lotus and writing koans based on the Freedom Outlaw’s Handbook than listening to any drivel I have to say on the subject. But bear with me.

I used to be a very angry, depressed and screwed-up person, and now I’m only one of those things. And I didn’t start getting some percentage of my shit together until I stopped waiting for the world to change. Maybe it would, maybe it wouldn’t, but the only thing I could really be sure of changing – if I’d only get my head out of my ass – was my own sorry self.

I could be as free as I wanted to be, but no politician or bureaucrat or white knight on a horse was going to decree that it be so. Nor could they prevent it. The only person with that power was me, and it was time to get at it.

Granted, I was in a position to make a radical and scary change in my literal environment without having to drag anybody else along. That simplified things. But the biggest change was in myself, in the realization that I did in fact have that power. Nobody could stop me. That’s work that anybody can take on, any time. The biggest change is in your own head.

If that sounds like self-help drivel, well, maybe it is. But at least I’m not selling a book. Point is – if the Clintons and Trumps of this world are getting you down? Back away. Look to your own freedom.

Somebody doesn’t like that? Quote’em the scripture according to the Divine Ms. M: