Full transparency is important to me, and it may just be one of the key reasons that it took me eight years to post my Stevetopian Declaration of Independence publicly. Another reason is that resisting the American government tends to get people killed, but that’s a discussion for another time. Because I want full transparency, I wanted to have my Declaration of Independence out in the public eye before launching my Patreon campaign on Sunday, at which time, I will officially declare my intention to secede from the U.S. federal government and embrace my personal sovereignty as the Autonomous Nation of Stevetopia.
Patreon is designed to help organize crowd-sourcing for content creators, and I am certainly that. However, because I tend to practice in a lot of fields, I’ve taken my time in trying out my various skills, and I have also written a bit about the state of the world I’ve seen and how I think it could work better. And although I’ve realized that my greatest artistic skill is as a songwriter, it’s even more important to me to create the art of my life by making improvements in the world around me, however small and unnoticeable to others they may be.
Two of those changes are ceasing any economic support to the U.S. federal government and desisting the delusion that it has any solutions to the challenges we face. So, in the midst of pursuing a viable career as a songwriter, I am also seceding from the U.S. federal government to focus on what the people of Stevetopia, population of one, can do when not deterred by the deleterious nonsense of the U.S. federal government and its tottering two-party system.
Now, because I have been negligent in putting it out to the public sooner, it just so happened that I released it on June 19, the day known as Juneteenth, which celebrates that last of the slaves being freed two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation. Obviously, the timing was not meant to step on the toes of African-Americans or overshadow their celebrations, and considering how many people Medium says have actually seen my manifesto, it certainly isn’t stealing any thunder. Nevertheless, I do actually think it’s kind of cool that my proclamation of my freedom fell on the same day that celebrates freedom across the land.
Though I will probably consider 6/21/20 the official launch, or Stevetopian Independence Day, or whatever, since that is the date of the launch of the Patreon campaign, it was not intended to fall on Father’s Day either. That was just another one of those universal flukes. However, it was considered a good day for it due to the new moon, solar eclipse, and being the first day after summer solstice, which makes it a great start to summer.
I was also inspired to design the Official Seal of Stevetopia. I’d been considering what I should put on it for a while, and I’m grateful that my girlfriend Martha threw out the idea of having a seal on my seal. His name is Jamal. The Latin quote above his head, “Ad meliora” means “Toward better things” and that is the essence of what Stevetopia is all about.
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