My friend @the-alien lost his steemit account to the hacker so he emailed me this text to post on his behalf. He'll be working through me until he's up and running again. -Gabe
My Name is Adil Elias but you may know me by @the-alien. You might be familiar with some short comedies I wrote here and might've noticed that I haven't been posting anything lately.
That's because my account was hacked and stolen.
The loss inspired me to write this story about a writer without his pen.
Ever since I joined, I had been waiting for Steemit to really explode and it finally started to feel like we were arriveing at that point a few days ago. It felt fantastic and it was just the beginning.
Steemit to the moon! I said barely a couple weeks ago. And then I witnessed steem getting higher than the Dollar, I witnessed 1600% in community growth, third position in coin market cap after Bitcoin and Ethereum… So, yes!
Let’s Take a Howl at That Moon!
It was better than I expected. It's what I was hoping for all along so why the hell wasn't I posting everyday as I used to when I first started? Fear? Too much analyzing at the cost of inaction? Am I waiting for stupid personal issues to be resolved to get my focus back, regain momentum, and achieve my recently lost État de grâce?
I don’t know... but then I realized that I didn’t need to know, all I needed to do was heed the great ancient Chinese proverb: Just Fucking Do It! ...Ok, might’ve had borrowed the slogan from some sport apparel company, but they’re probably made in China anyways, right?
I bought some coffee, I sat on the terrace, opened my laptop, ditched the coffee, poured a glass of wine, opened steemit, and…
That's when I realized that I had just been hacked!
What could I do? Absolutely nothing. Some friends I made here talked to @ned and @dan before reporting back that they were working around the clock everything would soon be fixed.
What else could I do? I don’t know, all I can tell you how it feels when you’re being locked out... It sucks!
You miss it. You check in every couple of hours to see if the problems have been solved. You realize that this thing came into your life only five weeks ago and now that it's gone, you really miss it. You learn not to take Steemit for granted. You look at that Facebook, Reddit, and Medium only to realize that they're a huge downgrade... and you start to realize just what it was that you lost.
We're a funny species, aren't we? We don’t usually realize the value of things until they're taken from us.
Fortunately, we're often able to overcome obstacles and endure the suck to come back stronger than before.
On that note, I want to share with you an epic story of human courage, ingenuity, and resilience.
So without further ado,
The Hunter Games
Until the latter part of the sixteenth century, all Bibles available were exclusively printed in Latin, and it was necessary for church officials to interpret the bible, and tell the worshipers what they needed to know, because most common men were not able to understand the Latina Lingua.
However, there were some pilgrims on the other hand that were able to read the Scriptures for themselves, and access the teachings of their sacred book.
That naturally created a conflict of interests with King James and the state-church who were hell bent to holding total and absolute monopoly on… Well, in this case, God.
Alpha and Omega
England back then had only one church that had to be approved by the English rulers. One church for the entire kingdom. These were the times of wine and roses in the marriage between state and church.
Everyone was obliged to attend that one true church, week in, week out, no exceptions. So if the English Monarch was Protestant, then the entire population was under the obligation to hold Protestant beliefs.
But if the ruler decides to change his mind and say something of the sort: “Fuck it! I’mma turn Catholic for a change!”
Then in that case, everyone wakes up next morning with brand new belief system annexed to their brain, everyone had to swap to Catholicism too.
And all those beliefs they previously held, all the teachings they grew up with, all those doctrines their entire lives revolved around, all of that had to go…
Out of the fucking window!
Just because the ruler decided to change his mind.
You have to change your faith…Or else, the fork.
No, not the devil's trident, I mean the heretics’ fork. No time for cognitive dissonance when the Church’s inquisition is after you.
Operation Monarch
All religion in the kingdom was strictly dictated by the status quo. Talk about intrusive government.
Every single church in the kingdom was under strict and direct orders from his majesty the supreme ruler, first of his name, Defender of the Realm, King of the Andals and the First Men, Breaker of Chains, and Mother of Dragons… Whatever.
They make this stuff up anyways.
Bottom line, since that dude had a crown on his head, no one else was allowed to even have a head.
There was no freedom to choose what a person should believe or how they could worship. The government controlled all of that shit.
Your mind belongs to us, you little serf!
Totally coincidental is the fact the very word government comes from the Latin word “Guberne”: Control, and “Mente” Mind. Mind-control. But I’m digressing.
Anyways, for the dynamic duo church-state it was absolutely crucial to get hold on the full supply of information in order for them to have complete and utter control over people’s minds.
As I said, totally coincidental.
So if some pilgrim refused to give up their personal beliefs, they would be imprisoned and tortured in an effort to make them agree with the state church. If they still refused to give up their convictions after torture, they would be then executed.
Outcasts
There were however two dominant sets of believers who disagreed with the practices of the Church of England. One of them wanted to stay in the church, but hoped to change its forms of worship.
Those were the "Puritans" who believe they could "purify" the church.
The other group did not believe the state-church should even exist at all, mainly because they believed that these institutions could not be changed.
After all, how do you change someone who burns you at the stake every time you disagree with them?
Luckily, history was on their side and so they are our protagonists today.
This group of pilgrims was called the "Separatists" and as their name suggests, they did in fact want to separate from something, in this case the Church of England.
In the separatist communities, various points of view were tolerated, standing in strong contrast with torture racks, wooden stakes... Oh, And that fork we've just mentioned.
As you can see, the difference between them and the state-church was irreconcilable, because let’s face it, how the hell would you meet them half way?
Would you burn people half to death every time they voice a different opinion?
Free to Be You and Me
When Queen Elizabeth I died in 1603 and James VI of Scotland was appointed James I of England, they asked him permission to start their own church.
But King James denied their request.
So they decided to leave England to preserve the integrity of both their conscience and their heart beat. And secretly, they began to board ships that were destined for Holland after paying the large expenditures these trips require.
The problem however is that the Separatists were betrayed.
In the last minute, King James' local sheriff with his bailiffs appeared on the scene to impede the poor separatists from keeping true to their name and separate
The pilgrims were then not only imprisoned and tortured but stripped them of their money, goods and their books, especially the books.
The second attempt to leave ended even more disastrously. King Joffrey, I mean James, had set yet another trap for the separatists, only this time women and children were among the victims as well.
Long story short, the guy is an evil genius, if he lived in Gotham city, Batman would be toast- As Charlie Sheen once said. Some might even say that he wrote the bible for the wrong team. Satan’s bible for example would’ve been much better suited for a man with his talent and inclinations.
Say My Name, Say My Name
At the beginning of the seventeenth century, King James announced the translation of the Bible into English, which surprise-surprise: Bears his name: The King James Version.
No ego issues in there!
One of the King's objectives was to totally replace the Geneva Bible with a new Bible that honors him (instead of God) through future generations.
Now, which version of the bible do you think the separatists held onto?
From there on, it was only a matter of time until King James started persecuting the pilgrims for refusing to give up the original bible, and the king’s army started chasing the pilgrims in their own villages, burning them down to the ground.
Spoiler alert: They survived.
Bad Boys, Bad Boys, Whatcha Gonna Do When They Come For You?
Once word was spread that the pilgrims were to be targeted, they immediately began to design their escape plan, and since the devil was bringing hell hounds, their counter-strategy was then very simple. Simple, yet genius.
Are you ready?
The Oldest Trick in the Book… Kinda.
When the soldiers were spotted two to three days away from the separatists’ camp, the pilgrims decided then to send two of their strongest and fastest young men on one direction while carrying some type of fish on their shoulders, a scarlet kipper to be more precise.
And all the young lads had to do was to keep running in one direction putting as much distance between them and the dogs.
The rest of the pilgrims, entire families with women, children and the elderly were all running on an entirely opposite direction.
You see, the reason the two young men had to carry the fish, wasn’t a product of the long standing love story between the British and Fish & Chips, but because that particular fish had a peculiar scent that was irresistible to the hounds.
The minute they took a whiff at those scales, the game was over before it has ever started.
Once the king’s soldiers were finally able to catch the two young men, if they caught them at all ― generally no less than a day or two after a long weary chase ― the families were by then already safe, sound and armed with their book of choice.
That fish in question was The Red Herring, and the genius trick was the infamous diversion strategy that goes by the same name.
A strategy that later went down as one of the greatest tricks in history of mankind.
A strategy that was born out of necessity to break free from the centralized monopolies that plagued our planet since its very inception.
The moral of the story? We don’t have to be run for our lives anymore. We don’t have to escape oppression… Hell, we don’t even have to send essays to disgruntled gate-keeping editors while nervously waiting for their approval as if we're waiting for the results of an STD test.
We don’t have to do any of that!
We have Steemit!
We can post. We can vote. We can mine. We can trade with one another… Who'd want to go back to the pre-steemian era?
Not me. Anyway, that’s how and why I realized that personally, I shouldn’t take Steemit for granted anymore.
I’m just glad I found it.
You can hack us, you can momentarily impede our ability to write, and you can try to bring us down but we'll find a way to come back stronger than ever. Once something is invented it cannot be un-invented and I, for one, refuse to downgrade.
“You can build walls all the way to the sky and I will find a way to fly above them. You can try to pin me down with a hundred thousand arms, but I will find a way to resist. And there are many of us out there, more than you think. People who refuse to stop believing. People who refuse to come to earth. People who love in a world without walls, people who love into hate, into refusal, against hope, and without fear. ― Lauren Oliver.
From The Alien with Love.
Yours sincerely,
Adil.