Leeches of Liberty

When I was a kid, my dad took me clamming on the South Branch of the Two Rivers in northwestern Minnesota. Or maybe it was the North Branch—I honestly don’t recall. Hell, I don’t even think I had any real geographical awareness at that point. We were just hunting freshwater clams.

You’d look for a trail—a faint line in the silt where the river was shallow and the sun still touched bottom. You’d go to one end of the trail, dig...

BAM! A fucking clam.

And so we clammed. We pulled in three or four gallons that day. At one point, I wandered off to deeper water, assuming—because ten-year-old logic—that the biggest clams must be out there. That’s when it happened.

Leeches.

Dozens of the little bastards clung to my legs. I panicked—swiping at them only smeared blood across my shivering skin. It wasn’t life-threatening, but it was terrifying.

My dad told me to stop so he could do it the proper way: burning each one off with the working end of a Marlboro. We didn’t argue about the need. My adult father and my child self were in full agreement—you don’t let something feed off your goddamned life’s blood.

I’d ripped off about a quarter of them in panic. He burned off the rest, one by one. Because that’s what you do. You get rid of them.

And yet here I am, years later, realizing we’ve built an entire society around feeding the leech.

Fast forward to this morning—I’m sitting in a doctor’s office. My appointment’s at 10:30. They told me to arrive at 10:15. I showed up at 10:05.

I got called back at 10:45.

That’s government-adjacent health care for you. But it wasn’t the wait that got under my skin—it was the system. The rules. The performance of politeness wrapped around expectations of blind obedience. Wait. Pay. Sign here. Comply. Smile while you do it.

Every level of government—federal, state, local—survives on our labor, our time, our money. And yet they behave like they own us. They regulate every breath, every structure, every mile we drive, and call it public service.

But let’s be honest. It’s servitude.

It’s not liberty.

It’s the performance of freedom—within an acceptable range.

You can’t own land without paying annual dues.

You can’t build on it without permission.

You can’t operate a business without licensure.

You can’t sell, drive, or even die without the leech getting its cut.

We’ve convinced ourselves this is fine. That we need it. That it’s safer this way. But liberty was never about safety. It was about the right to risk, to try, to own, to fail, and to rise again. Somewhere along the way, we traded all of that for comfort and convenience—and gave the leech a permanent seat at the table.

I don’t know if true freedom still exists in this country.

Maybe in thought.

Maybe in expression—maybe.

Though even that comes with invisible tripwires. Don’t believe me? Try getting ChatGPT to use the word retard.

What we have now can’t rightly be called liberty. And yet, isn’t that why the Founding Fathers rose up against an armed king? To declare that freedom is every person’s God-given right? Weren’t they trying to rip off the leech?

And yet, here we are—nearly two hundred and fifty years later—

Staring down a fat, well-fed leech on our collective leg,

Wondering how the fuck it got there.