Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! - Jesse Ventura [5]
If you want good government, you must have an involved citizenry. Yet it seems like apathy is a contagious disease. People don’t pay attention to government because they don’t think it affects them. Well, you work five days a week. Why wouldn’t you pay attention to an entity that’s taking the fruits of your labor two of those days? Wouldn’t that be enough motivation to pay heed to what your tax dollars are being used for?
Today, the special interests have a stranglehold on our reality. Nobody is being told the truth. We’ve bought a bill of goods. I can’t believe everyone is so asleep. I achieved the impossible once—a wrestler becoming governor of one of our fifty states. Why is nobody else coming forward?
Or do I have to throw myself into the political ring again? And, if I do, is it worth the price that my family and I will have to pay?
This is the dilemma I’m facing. I can’t live with this apathy. I can’t tell myself it’s not happening. I have to stand up and talk about it. I love my country and what it was founded for. I believe deeply in its inherent freedoms. And we’re losing them. We’re losing more of them every day. I can’t just ignore it.... I don’t know about you. . . .
Psychologically, I needed to break away from the United States. I also felt it was time in my life to go on an adventure. I was still young enough, but I knew the window of opportunity was closing. From watching my parents pass on, I knew that your health becomes an issue at some point and eventually you’re not going to be able to travel. As you get older and older, you revert back to a childlike existence, where your little house and neighborhood are about the extent of your world. So, an adventure was important for me—not only physically, but mentally.
I needed to refocus, to do something that really went back to basics. And I found that, even in the twenty-first century, you can still be something of a Kit Carson. There are frontiers left to explore that are relatively untouched by humans. Some of these are located along the Mexican peninsula known as Baja California, almost a thousand miles of desert, mountains, and sea.
My wife Terry and I left Minnesota in the middle of winter, planning to drive our truck-camper, pulling a trailer with two wave runners, all the way across America and then over the border into Mexico. This was also an opportunity to renew our relationship. After playing the game of governor and First Lady for four years, in the public eye constantly, with our fully scheduled agendas, we’d often been like ships passing in the night.
Our two kids were grown up now, and had their own lives to lead. Tyrel was out in Hollywood, where he was working at becoming a screenwriter. Jade still lived in Minnesota, and was making plans to get married. So Terry and I were free in a way we’d really never been during all those years I’d spent in the limelight—as a pro wrestler, a movie actor, a radio personality, and finally as the improbable governor of the thirty-second state.
I’d have a lot of time along this journey to reflect.
At first, it feels strange leaving all the comforts of home behind. The three-story place we moved into after I decided not to seek a second term as governor is really my dream house. Built on a lake, the house is also right next to a railroad track. Even though I might be fishing and in complete solitude when a train goes by, it always awakensed me to the fact that the rest of the world is still moving. It’s a beautiful sight actually, when you’re out on the lake. Maybe that’s what helped put the wanderlust in me, too.
I live north of St. Paul, and it’s the first time I’ve ever lived east of the Mississippi River. As we pull out of our gate and head down along the shoreline of nearby White Bear Lake, I recall to Terry a story that my dad told me long ago. “This was a very famous lake back in the twenties and thirties. Back then, most of the laws were state-to-state, and if you hadn’t committed a crime in one particular state, the authorities there wouldn’t bother