Holding the Line — A 2025 Invocation of Paul Goodman In 1946, in the aftermath of world war and the birth of the atomic age, a poet and radical named Paul Goodman wrote a slim, uncompromising book called The May Pamphlet. Later retitled Drawing the Line, it was a meditation on how to live freely and responsibly in a world sliding toward conformity, bureaucracy, and spiritual numbness. Goodman wasn’t a partisan or a pundit. He was a man of conscience — and Drawing the Line was his answer to a society where freedom was being swallowed by central authority, blind obedience, and institutionalized violence. He argued, simply: “The line is the boundary of one’s own personal responsibility.” That is: each of us must decide what we will not do — not because a law forbids it, but because our conscience commands it. In the 1940s, this meant refusing to participate in war, mass production of death, and the soul-crushing machinery of industrial conformity. In 2025, it means refusing surveillance capitalism. Refusing centralized money. Refusing algorithmic manipulation. Refusing to become data cattle for a dying empire. It means choosing voluntary, open protocols over authoritarian platforms. It means reclaiming local production, trust-based exchange, and peer-to-peer meaning. It means Bitcoin over banks, Nostr over networks, sovereign community over managed compliance. We don’t just draw the line. We must hold the line — together. Because drawing the line alone is a whisper. Holding the line as a community is a declaration. It tells the world: this far, no further. We are not afraid to live in truth. Paul Goodman’s voice was a signal from another century — but it rings clearer now than ever. And so to all who still burn with the flame of freedom: Draw the line. Hold the line. Build beyond the line. #nostr #Bitcoin #drawingtheline #holdtheline #PaulGoodman #sovereignty #localfirst #protocolnotplatform #livefree #photography