Concepts that are ultimately meaningful are always at odds with powers that would control them.

Those powers will want only profitable, easy to digest ideas that dull the senses and limit the intellect. Such powers are not interested in ideas that are intellectual or actually socially progressive. The ideas that lead to exploration and question the goodness of profitable, easy to digest ideas demand more than empty rhetoric from smiling faces.

Courtesy, privacy, responsibility, and justice do not pay. Division, data, unaccountability, and easy answers often do pay at least in the short term and for the few. But it is in the small battles that we fight against the war machine and those who support it, that the war is wone.

The war machine is subtle. With ease comes comfort. With comfort comes apathy. And with apathy comes defeat. Those that value worthwhile ideas and meaningful activities and are willing to fight, will fight lonely battles in the night, if only for themselves, for ideas that are greater than all of us.

But in the darkness of greed, intrusion, control, injustice and apathy they are the pinpricks of light in an otherwise dark tunnel.