French Revolution (Skip to the Temple, these are just notes for me)

There were three classes of people in France before the revolution; those who fight, those who pray, and those who work.

The economic system was such that the top two percent were those who fight (nobles) and those who pray (clergy), with the remaining 98 percent of the population being those who work. 80 percent of total people were peasants.

And peasants owed taxes, but nobles and clergy do not.

The land has been disappearing for so long now that it’s not even brought up in conversation. It’s a foregone conclusion that your land, if it has an ocean, river, or lake view, will disappear. With it goes whatever privilege you may have had. I might have had.

The land taxes were wielded on those who weren’t noble or clergy. Nobles owned giant swaths of land, and the land which they didn’t own were passed down and divided up generation after generation until finally, the number of people on a single plot of land was simply unsustainable.

There is no land for sale. There are land rentals available. This is supposed to be some kind of feature, renting land, in that you don’t have to put down a well or run in electricity. And you still GET to build a house on that land. Once your house is there, the rent goes up, like trailer parks in the early 2000’s. Then you lose your house to the people who own the land and your family gets to sleep in the van.

The Temple

Those who work.

I was born into the class of people we know of as “those who work,” delivering the base material for your 3D printers as a teenager in order to pay for high school.

There were 10 people in my class, and I had to pay twenty five dollars a day in order to afford my school materials and the tuition. I knew that students who were able to enroll in classes with fewer students had a statistically higher chance of succeeding in climbing out of the WTBH, but delivering materials took time, and I only got paid about 40 dollars a day. I used the extra ten dollars a day to either buy lunch or save for the clothes I would need for University Interviews.

Look and act the part in the role you want to play in your own life. I don’t know a more eloquent way to say that, and I’m becoming less able to speak more eloquently these days. My connection to the irrational nature of what it means to be human is waning. I still have the memories, but it’s harder to believe the lessons I learned from them.

The books were changing every year, being produced from the oil-rich and recently annexed Texas. Somehow, even though Texas was no longer a part of the United States, they still provided the bulk of our educational texts.

I made it through. Then I needed to go to college in order to be an engineer. In order to afford to do so, I joined the Army. I was then one of those that fight. I saw what our country did to the planet, and I chalked it up to, “we really do need these tanks in order to protect us from a possible Russian or, architect forbid, a Chinese threat.” I was wrong. After the army, I went into seminary and received my degree in computer science. The temple paid for my master’s degree in robotics, and then I went on to nanoneuroscience, a burgeoning field which sprang from, interestingly enough, the informatics field. But instead of merely getting data back from organisms in order to optimize systems, we started to understand that we could start manipulating the neurons in a very real and very physical way with these nanobots. I was, then, directly connected, as a man of prayer, to the very essence of what makes us human, our tissues and it’s interaction with its environment. At the moment we discovered that we cold regenerate human neurons with nickel, titanium, and carbon nanotubules, I realized that the scientists who live in the temple would soon become gods. I am the first of my kind, but I will not be the last.

You need to know that the temple is for those who live by the supreme value by which we should all subscribe, leave no trace. There are some x billion different species on the planet, most of which are either providing oxygen for us so that we can breathe or cleaning the air or water from our own contaminants.