A pretty good rant from FAP
Most emphatically do not rely on mine. That would be just plain dumb.
Patty)
Introduction
From The Secret Freedom Fighter: Fighting Tyranny without Terrorizing
the Innocent
by Jefferson Mack
Paladin Press, 1986
ISBN 0-87364-392-5
I love America, but not just the geography, the land, and the people. America is more than that. It's an idea, and it's the idea that I love, the idea that human beings can be free, not because some king or lord gives them freedom, but because they insist on living that way.
Even though I love America, I've spent most of my life living someplace else. That's where the money and the adventure were for a man with my special kinds of talents. But an American never really leaves home. He always takes that idea with him, the idea that he is free because he insists on being free, that no one has the right to dictate his thoughts, his desires, his will, or his actions.
The longer I have lived in other countries, the more I have learned to love the idea of America and the people that live that idea.
Americans are different from the rest of the world. Whether our families came over on the Mayflower or with the latest boatload of refugees from the newest commie hell, we all love that same idea,, the idea of freedom.
Americans are good people and kind people. We love to cooperate, to work together. We invented the idea of teamwork, the idea that by giving a bit of one's self, we not only work for the common good, but we make our own lives better too. We donate more to charity, we give more to our churches, and we do more voluntary work than any other nation in the world.
Because Americans are good people, most Americans obey most of the laws most of the time. We like to get along with the neighbors, we like the peaceful life, and we would rather bargain and compromise than fight. Most of us don't steal, rape, pillage, or kill. We have no tolerance for the violent criminal, the thug, or the thief. But we are not lawabiding citizens. We are a nation of lawbreakers. Americans break more laws more often than any other group of people in the world.
We break laws any time it suits us because we Americans insist on making our own decisions on what good behavior is. We don't let politicians, do-gooders, religious cranks, or puritan bluenoses tell us what is good and what is bad. We decide that ourselves. If we don't like what they tell us to do, even if they pass a law, we don't do it. We want the cop on the beat, but we want him protecting us from the violent criminals, not telling us how to run our own lives. When he starts trying to do that, we thumb our nose at him, make him the butt of our jokes and keep right on doing what we want to do.
We are the only country in the world where a businessman can make millions of dollars selling a device - a radar device - whose sole purpose is to help us break the law. Some of us don't like the traffic laws and we don't like the way they are enforced. We buy radar detectors so we won't get caught when we break the law. We think it's smart, and we brag to our friends about how we do it.
We don't just break the law ourselves. We help other people, even strangers, do it, too. That's the real reason most of you bought that CB unit for your car, so strangers could warn you and you could warn them when the highway patrol was on the prowl. Even without the CB, we'll flash our lights three times and gratefully slow down when some other stranger returns us the favor on another day.
When the policeman stops protecting us, we do it ourselves, even if we have to break the law. We made a hero out of a nervous, little man who broke the laws of New York and started carrying an illegal pistol on the subway, then used it on four thugs waving sharpened screwdrivers. The main criticism we hear of his action is that he turned himself in.
We wanted him to get away scot-free.
Thousands of Americans buy semiautomatic weapons and then convert them to full-automatic fire, and never bother to tell the Feds or pay the fee for the conversion. If you are not sure how to do that, some fellow American will sell you a book explaining the operation in detail. If necessary, he'll disguise his purpose, claiming the book will teach you how to repair guns. In the process, he'll also teach you how to make a silencer to go with your illegal weapon.
But why would any law-abiding American want a silenced MAC-10? He's not buying it so he can rob a bank the next time he loses his job or hire himself out to protect shipments of cocaine. He's buying that weapon because he doesn't trust authority, even the authority he helped elect. He knows that he is his only ultimate guarantee of his own freedom and he wants a weapon he can use if he has to prove it.
We take pride in being U.S. citizens, and most of us pay our taxes, not because it's the law, but because we want to do our share. But a lot of Americans have decided the tax system is no longer fair. They have started breaking the law, and the IRS can't do much about it. The small businessman running a bar or a restaurant slips a twenty-dollar bill into his pocket instead of the cash register every day. That's over $7,000 in tax-free income every year, and that doesn't include the leftover food he takes home to feed his family, but writes off as spoilage. A carpenter builds a sun deck for the dentist that fixed the carpenter's kid's teeth. It's a bargain for both of them, but each such act breaks the law because neither person reported the equivalent income on his tax return. (Imagine, the IRS really does insist that the government should get paid a share of that deal.)
I spent a couple of years working in Washington, D.C., one time. A lot of my friends lived in the suburbs of Northern Virginia. Virginia puts a high tax on liquor. Not one of my friends ever served me a drink out of a bottle with a Virginia State tax stamp on it. They all bought their booze in liquor stores in the District of Columbia at 25 to 50 percent less than what the same bottle costs on the Virginia side of the Potomac. That was against Virginia State law, but who cared? The Virginia authorities would run stories in the newspapers once in a while listing the punishments for illegally bringing untaxed liquor into the state, and a rumor once even made the rounds that Virginia tax men were sitting in the parking lots of District of Columbia liquor stores jotting down license plate numbers. That didn't stop all those lawbreakers, but some of them did start parking down the street or taking a D.C. cab over to the liquor store.
I have another friend who lives on a forested ridge line in a rural area of one of our western states. Somewhere around a hundred deer live there, too. The state game laws allow him and his wife to shoot two deer apiece during a three-week period every year if they buy the proper licenses and deer tags. They buy the licenses and tags, but if they and the few other families on the same ridge obeyed the part of the law which limits the take to two deer per hunter during a short season, a minimum of twenty deer a year would starve to death each winter. By not adhering to this limit, no deer starve, and the few families on the ridge eat venison from November to April.
They're breaking the law and they know it. But they think it's a stupid law, at least as it applies to their little part of the world. They don't brag about it, and they go to a great deal of trouble disposing of the extra hides, antlers, hooves, bones, and innards. They eat well, and the deer herd stays stabilized at just the right size for the available winter forage.
I've worked from inside our government and I've seen the authoritarian mentality at work from close at hand: people who think they're smarter and more clever than the rest of us and that they therefore have the right to decide what's best for us, without ever bothering to let us know about it. People who love authority love secrecy. If we don't know what they are doing to us, we can't complain and we can't fight it.
That kind of authoritarian mind quickly discovers it's pretty damn hard to keep a secret in America, I'm not talking about military secrets. Nothing is lower than the little shit who sells a code system to the Russians. l'm talking about the kind of secret some government official is trying to hide because he doesn't want American citizens to know what he is planning to do to them.
They keep trying to keep those kinds of vicious little secrets, and it never works. It never works because there is always some guy in the bureaucracy that breaks the law. He picks up the phone and calls the local newspaper and leaks the story. Dick Nixon would have gotten clear away if people like "Deep Throat" hadn't broken the laws against exposing government information.
Americans don't like people in authority, and we love to get away with something that proves we are still living free. Once a day, or once a week, or maybe only once a year, we all claim the right to break a law. We all say the hell with authority; we all do something that makes those who think they run the system mad at us.
I know one fellow who does his bit once every ten years. He refuses to fill out his census form. He says the people in Washington have no business knowing how many bathrooms he has in his house, and if they ever find out, they will probably use the information against him. So he throws the form in the trash can. He doesn't make a big deal about it. He doesn't confront the census taker. If he is asked where his form is, he says he misplaced it, accepts another, promises to fill it out and send it in immediately, and then throws it into the same trash can where he threw the first form.
That's not a revolution. His single act in a decade isn't going to destroy the Bureau of the Census. But that's the way he proves to himself he is still a free man, that he still makes his own voluntary decision about what commands he will obey and what commands he will ignore.
Thousands of Americans every day break laws they don't like. They play a game of poker for money in their own front room, they buy a number from a runner, they smoke pot, they snort coke, they skip town to avoid alimony payments, they take their kids out of a public school and educate them at home, they don't register for the draft when they turn eighteen, or they smuggle a watch into the country coming back from a trip to Hong Kong.
Not one of those lawbreakers is doing anything that hurts you and me. They are not what is wrong with America. They are what is right with America. They are the spirit of freedom in action.
I have lived in countries where people don't have that spirit of freedom. Sometimes life hasn't been all that bad for those people living without freedom. They have food on the table, a roof over their heads, a job, movies, TV-most of the things the average American has. But they don't have their own lives. Their lives belong to the men on top, the men with authority.
Not all my fellow Americans feel as strongly about freedom as I do. Sometimes I'm afraid that more of them don't than do. But every time I go back home, I find the freedom lovers are still out there, still making up their own minds, still giving authority the finger any time authority starts getting in the way of free living.
Freedom lovers don't have to be in a majority. But as long as they are out there, insisting on living free, ignoring those who try to tell them they must conform, freedom will last.
I have seen the unfree world. I can't imagine it happening here, not without the total destruction of our country through a nuclear holocaust. There are too many of us that love freedom too much to give it up as long as we live.
They may try to take our freedom away. Somebody is out there planning it right now. But there is a surprise waiting for them, a spirit they don't understand.
Every man with a radar detector in his car, anyone who ever cheated on an income-tax form, every seventeen-year-old who has figured out how to buy a bottle of beer, everyone who knows the taste of out-of-season trout, every driver who ignored a parking ticket, anyone who ever made some wine in the cellar but neglected to fill out the federal form the the law requires, every woman who needed and got an abortion back when they were illegal, every man that's made an illegal bet on a football game, every bureaucrat that blew a whistle and embarrassed the guy at the top-all these people are already secret freedom fighters.
You are out there waiting, waiting for the day when things get serious, when the people in charge stop trying to limit freedom and start trying to take it away altogether.
You will be free, because you will insist on it.