Truth, well it is a valuable commodity, rare, precious, difficult to come by, and easy to pollute. Truth can also be dangerous, as any valuable and rare thing, possessing it can, in the right circumstances be dangerous. The bigger the truth, the more dangerous it becomes. If a truth is big enough, not only is it dangerous to those that possess it, it also becomes too big to believe, or process.

Consider Edward Snowden, or Julian Assange as two examples, related in many ways. What I am about to say does not excuse all of the subsequent copycat ‘whistleblowers” that tried to pull a Snowden, and under normal circumstances, what Snowden did was wrong. But what he exposed to the sleeping masses of the world was not ‘normal circumstances’.

Frankly, if you want to be honest, it was ‘march on the Bastille with torches and pitchforks’ sort of stuff. Many people that worked in and around the government knew most of what Snowden released, but nobody could really ever paint the picture of how vast and deep it was, how so many programs were the antithesis of how we see our reality. Snowden made it possible for anyone with eyes to see and a mind to think to understand it all.

Snowden ran for his life, risked never seeing his fiancé again. Assange spent a decade in prison because of the release of that data – make no mistake, no matter the pretext, he is a political prisoner.

Yet – in the big picture, none of it mattered. Any American can read for themselves things about their own government that nobody really wants to believe. But nothing changed. Nothing really at all. No outrage, or mass uprising in the streets, nobody was tarred and feathered, nobody (except Assange) went to jail. Nothing…Snowden released a truth that was too big for people to process.

Those that came after Snowden, I have less sympathy and respect for them. It seems they merely wanted to make a name for themselves ('seems', I cannot know). It is ironic that nearly all of them have either been pardoned, released, or forgiven, while Snowden will never return home and Assange will die in prison, unconvicted.

What Snowden released, as eye-opening as it should have been to almost everyone, was merely a drop in the bucket of the truth of our world. If people could not chew the meat he provided they will never see the rest. It is all rigged, all of it. There is not a single string one can pull that does not in some way eventually go back to an enormous, messy, jumbled ball of twine. If a person insists on pulling hard enough, well most never make it to the actual ball of twine, most get lost in intentional deceptions (or coopted) and red-herrings, those that make it past that, well some of those exited this world prematurely.

If by some strange twist of fate, and good fortune, a person got past all the guards, avoided red herrings, and got right up to the big ball of twine and unraveled it all – it still would not matter. In the end, they would sound about as rational as Alex Jones, a guy the twine masters seem to have put in place just for that purpose, to disseminate a little bit of truth wrapped in a lot of lunacy and lies.

I had my own little run-in recently with one small ‘string’. Attached to it were all manner of minor d-list misfits. Tools really, none of the main characters in the story will ever be in charge of anything important, they are bit players in someone else's movie, but they do play a role.