Free State Observer

I frequently get the feeling that I’m in the minority amongst New Hampshire liberty activists for having a “normal” job. I define “normal” as on a schedule of Monday - Friday, 9 - 5 (officially, anyway; the reality often exceeds those boundaries). I have health insurance. I pay extra for long-term disability insurance, so that if I come down with cancer, get in a car accident, or whatever, I won’t become either destitute or a burden to others. I save for the proverbial rainy day. And I pay taxes. Boy, do I pay taxes.

I laughed, with a tinge of mania, when my annual Social “Security” Statement arrived a week ago. It informed me that I’ve already paid over $55,000 towards my retirement “benefits”, which I’m sure I’ll be able to start collecting back at age 67, right after monkeys start flying out of my butt. Until then, I’m on my own. No, scratch that; even if monkeys DO fly out of my butt, I’ll be on my own.

Some make the argument that ’tis virtuous to not “feed the system”. My taxes pay for wars. Do I lay awake at night, racked with guilt over that fact? Um, NO. No more than I’d feel racked with guilt over being mugged, repeatedly. Angry, frustrated, impotent; these things I feel. But guilt? The government is like my friendly neighborhood pimp. I sell my services in the marketplace; he pockets a percentage of my take, with the clear understanding that if I hold out on him, he’ll beat me senseless.

Anywho, I just read an old article by Murray Rothbard on this exact subject, and most unsurprisingly, he puts it far better than I ever could. Preach it, Murray:

Libertarians in a State-Run World

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[note: this is the second half of a post entitled "a fable" ]

For quite some time, Jo sailed his boat alone on Lake Rika, trying to sort through the thoughts in his head and feeling increasingly frustrated and confused.  Finally, he decided to seek advice from a wise man who was rumored to live on a small island on the lake.  Jo anchored his boat off the edge of the island, swam ashore, and began hiking around searching for the legendary wise man.  As usually happens, the wise man turned out to be in the last place he looked.  The wise man was very old and thin, and wore nothing but a worn old deerskin which barely covered enough of him to be considered socially appropriate back in the village.  Clearly, the wise man wasn’t concerned with such things.  Although Jo didn’t have an invitation, the wise man greeted him warmly and seemed to have no problem with a strange villager showing up on his doorstep seeking advice.

Jo launched into a lengthy monologue about all he had been thinking about: that Sammy was not great and benevolent; that it wasn’t right to let a lake monster eat your children; that it wasn’t fair that some people were forced to feed the monster while others fed themselves out of the lake monster supplies; that it didn’t seem to make much of a difference whom exactly was on the Council of Elders at any given time.  He asked the wise man to explain a way out of this mess.  What was a simple fisherman to do?

The wise man, who had been smoking a pipe while Jo ranted, sat silently for some time.  Finally, he responded with a question:  Where do lake monsters come from?

Jo was baffled.  What did he mean, where do lake monsters come from?  They come from lakes, obviously!

“If lake monsters come from lakes, how did they survive before villagers began feeding them?”,  he asked.

Jo thought about this for a moment.  He really wasn’t sure.  Were there even any lake monsters before there were villagers?  Could Sammy have ever grown so large and powerful if not for generations of villagers tending to his diet?  This sort of chicken-and-egg question was interesting, but somewhat beside the point.  The fact is, there ARE lake monsters, and he wanted to know what to do about it.

“Alright, let me ask you another question.  How do you destroy a lake monster?”, the wise man queried.

“That’s easy!”, Jo said triumphantly. “Stop feeding it!”

“Ah!” responded the wise man.

Jo waited a moment, expecting more of a response.  But none came.  “But, of course, it’s not enough just for *me* to stop feeding the lake monster.  A number of other productive villagers need to do so as well.”

“Indeed”, mused the wise man.

Jo was getting a bit annoyed with this.  “So…… how do I convince the other villagers to stop feeding Sammy?”

“Who convinced you to stop feeding him?” responded the wise man.

Jo opened his mouth to respond, then paused.  “Well, no one, exactly. I just sort of… you know… figured it out myself. After reading several books by radical village philosophers, listening to podcasts while repairing my nets, and talking with people down at the pub.”

“Well, there you go.”  smiled the wise man.

Jo was definitely annoyed now.  “What do you mean, there you go?!  Are you saying I can’t teach anyone anything, they can only teach themselves?”

“I didn’t say anything”, said the wise man.

“That’s not an answer!!” Jo exploded, completely frustrated now.  “I can’t just let my friends and neighbors keep throwing a large portion of their crops into the lake, and watch their children get eaten.  I should be able to convince them to stop!”

“There is no “should”, my young friend.  To quote a wise man (Jo found this slightly amusing.  He wondered if the Wise Man considered himself to be a wise man; if not, did the wise man the Wise Man was about to quote consider himself to be a wise man?  Did anyone actually think of himself as wise, or was the attainment of wisdom to understand that wisdom is actually a path, rather than a destination?  He cut off this line of thinking and drew his focus back to what the Wise Man was saying): “the essence of philosophy is to accept the universe as it is, rather than try to force it into some preconceived shape.”

Jo thought about this for several moments.  Finally he said “So you mean, I can’t teach the other villagers about the true nature of the lake monster? I just have to wait and see if they figure it out for themselves?”

“I didn’t say it”, the Wise Man said again, a small smile twitching the corner of his lips.

“Well, what am I supposed to do in the meantime?” Jo asked. “I mean, other than fishing, gardening, hunting, and trying to avoid both having my fish taken for Sammy and getting thrown in the stockade?”

“When’s the last time you kissed a girl, kid?”

Jo turned beet red.  “Well, I’ve been *busy*…” he stammered.  “Fishing is a time-consuming occupation, you know! The fish don’t just leap into the nets by themselves. ”

“Uh huh” replied the old man.

“So let me see if I’ve got this straight.  What you’re basically saying is that I should just focus on being the best fisherman I can be, don’t feed lake monsters, try not to get thrown in the stockade, and find a nice girl to spend time with, hopefully one who shares my anti-lake monster sentiments?”

“That sounds like an excellent plan!” smiled the Wise Man.

Jo had a feeling that this conversation had not gone quite according to plan.  Or rather, that he seemed to now have a plan, but wasn’t quite sure where it had come from.  Oh well, this was making his head hurt.  The old man was clearly wise, and had given him a not unpleasant plan; actually, it was pretty much exactly what he would have done if there had never been a lake monster in the first place.  He swam back to his boat, hauled up the anchor, and set sail for the village.   He’d continue to hone his fishing skills, work on his garden, put away as much as he could in preparation for the dreaded “Peak Fish” scenario, and share his anti-lake monster books and podcasts with any acquaintance who seemed willing to give them a listen.  Also,  there was that cute girl he had seen at the pub, but never actually got up the nerve to speak to before.  Carpe draco pen! (This was an old villager expression that translated to “Seize the lake monster by the tail.”)

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Whoa, it’s been five months since I blogged anything. I blame Facebook. I used to keep a background part of my mind subconsciously focused on noting things to blog about, but now that part is redirected towards noting things to Facebook about, in a neverending quest to amuse my friends (both of them) and serve as a lesson to others, usually on what *not* to do with your life.

At this time five years ago, I was driving across the country, en route to New Hampshire. Seems like a good time to reflect and review on where I’ve been and where I’m going.

Random thoughts on the past five years (I also blame Facebook for damaging my ability to put together a cohesive narrative; everything comes out in 400-characters-or-less bullet points now. :-\ ):

– New Hampshire is a beautiful place. I am very fortunate to live here.

– No regrets about leaving California. That said, I have observed that some wounds don’t heal with time. Or perhaps I just haven’t found the proper emotional or intellectual salves to apply to them. Also, as Jon Kabat-Zinn has noted, “Wherever you go… there you are.”

– I love my funky little log cabin in the woods. I’m utterly failing to keep it up to Middle-Class Suburban White Guy standards of decency, but then, I don’t really care about such standards.

– Clean country living, while perhaps boring to some, appears to be good for my health. I’ve lost 15 pounds, and according to my fancy-pants electrical impedance scale that does everything short of trimming your toenails while you stand on it, I’ve aged negative 3 years over the past 9 months. I haven’t had a drink in over 7 months (without the assistance of drugs or AA, I might add), which is a major accomplishment considering that A) most of the people I socialize with drink like fish and B) my God but I love to drink. We’ll see how long I can keep it up. It’s a real struggle some days.

– Two years ago, I wrote this: “I’ve been meaning to reread “1984?; it’s been many years. But IIRC, it seems like the current reality of the U.S. may actually be worse than Orwell envisioned. This is actually worse than all sorts of sci fi dystopian books/movies I’ve read/seen over the years.” Since then, I *did* reread 1984. I wouldn’t say the U.S. is worse than what Orwell envisioned, but the similarities are mind-blowingly shocking and depressing… and at the same time, difficult to focus your eyes on, seeing as how it’s the reality in which we live all day, every day, and it gets increasingly hard to remember or envision a different/better way of living, like a fish trying to imagine what it would be like to not live in cold water.

– Despite all the heinous police state stuph growing and spreading in the U.S., I’m also aware that, in the grand scheme of things, I’m incredibly fortunate to have grown up (well, as “up” as I’m ever going to get) in late 20th century America, enjoying health, wealth, freedom, recorded music, books so cheap people throw them away, the world at my fingertips via the Internet, inexpensive air travel, a huge diversity of tasty things to eat and drink (some of them even good for me), and, with statistically low exceptions, nobody trying to shoot me, bomb me, rape and pillage me, etc. When a bad day is a traffic jam on the interstate, or the expresso machine broken at Starbucks, you’re pretty lucky.

– The New Hampshire liberty movement continues to grow, and now has discrete branches espousing different strategies. One branch favors living today as if there were no coercive government. This strategy appears to me to result in frequent arrests, weeks spent in jail, pissing off one’s neighbors, hateful comments in the local paper, but hey, whatever floats your boat! See http://freekeene.com/ for more info. Another branch favors working within the political system, trying to get more pro-freedom people elected to office, ousting anti-freedom people, fighting bad laws, supporting good laws, etc. The New Hampshire Liberty Alliance, with which I got re-involved last year after a year or two of not really speaking to one another, is a leader in this department. Now, longtime readers of this blog might wonder why I’d spend time and energy on such a thing, after whining at length about my loss of faith in electoral politics, my evolution to flaming anarchist, adulation of Stefan “Big Chatty Forehead” Molyneux, etc…. well, I’ll tell you (and try to be brief about it). Basically, while I would love for there to be a Rothbardian button to push, and would gladly push it if given the opportunity, letting any ensuing chips of short-term chaos fall where they may, the sad fact is, there IS no button. There’s never going to be one (or I lack the optimism and vision to believe there will be one, I just don’t know). Even if the upcoming economic crash (which I firmly believe *is* coming) brings our current political administration to its knees, a peaceful anarchocapitalist society is not going to rise from its ashes. Far from it. We are a nation of soft, flabby, spoiled children who expect certain necessities of life to be provided to us, reliably, by government, (even some of us who shriek about wanting more freedom), and I just don’t see that system going away any time soon. Therefore, as a means of self-defense, I will do what I can to ensure that better (or at least, less bad) people get elected to local and state office, and do what I can to keep my local and state taxes from going up. On the federal level, I will do what I need to do to keep the jack-booted thugs from putting a bullet in my head. And remember: Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer. — Sun-tzu

– As for five years from now… well. I think our (and by “our”, I’m referring to Americans here) world is going to look quite a bit different. Many people are in for a rude awakening, economically speaking. Comparatively speaking, New Hampshire is going to be one of the better places to be in the U.S. I’m glad I’m here. And as long as you don’t push me or try to take my stuff, I’d be right glad to have you here too.

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Last July, I blogged about moving into my new house, the first house I’ve ever owned. Also, the first place in the country I’ve ever lived. Since then, I’ve learned all sorts of new lessons, sometimes the comically hard way. I’ve lost some weight and gained some muscle. Haven’t had much time for blogging, since I’m generally either a) working b) mowing my ginormous lawn c) commuting (which now sucks up 1.5 hours a day) d) hauling my own garbage to the town dump or, most recently, e) battling snow.

Is it all worth it? Absolutely.

Here’s a smorgasbord of anecdotes from the past 6 months:

– My house has mice. Lots of them, judging by the scampering sounds often coming from the walls around me. My cats have spent their entire lives indoors, but hunting mice is clearly instinctual. What to do with them after *catching* them is more of a grey area. My cats don’t want to kill the mice so much as bat them, smash them, jump up and down on them, and prance around proudly with mouse limbs dangling out of their mouths. A couple of times, I’ve become so sympathetic to the living creature that has become a toy that I pick it up and take it outside. I’ve had to retrieve several corpses from the living room floor and provide burial services (i.e. open the door and fling them outside). One poor little guy was disemboweled and bleeding all over the place, but still alive. I bawled my head off, took him outside, and hoped for his sake he had a few moments to make his peace with the Mouse Lord before dying, hopefully quickly. Ah, nature red in tooth and claw, and dripping rodent blood on my hardwood floor…

– My house has a variety of heat sources, none of which I’m fully in control of. It has skylights and a greenhouse-style glass wall in the living room, which is great for natural light but turns the place into a sauna in the summertime. Also, I cleverly located my computer monitor in such a way that it’s rendered useless by glare for a certain period of time each day. I do, however, have more plants than in all the rest of my life put together, and they’re all doing quite well. It’s like a tiny tropical paradise inside while, outside, it’s currently below freezing and snowing.

– The primary heat source is an enormous, scary-looking furnace thing in the basement. I suddenly can relate to the kid in “Home Alone” and his desire to avoid going into the basement. At first, I couldn’t figure out how to turn the thing on. My dad came to visit and he couldn’t figure it out either. Some combination of pushing buttons and fiddling with the thermostat eventually worked, and everything was great, until the day it mysteriously stopped working. After several days of increasing chilliness, I opened an account with a local fuel service. I told the extremely nice lady on the phone that I was completely clueless as to the nature of my heating device; fortunately, she took it in stride. When she asked how much fuel was left in the tank, I said I had no idea… but a sneaking suspicion popped into my head: there was that gauge-looking thing on the top of the fuel tank. I never really looked at it, trying to avoid direct eye contact with the rusty behemoth in the basement. Sucking it up, I finally took a good look at it, and oh, hey, it was empty! Guess that explained why my feet were turning blue. The good news was, it was an easy problem to fix (put fuel in tank). The bad news was, I had absolutely no idea how much liquid heating fuel costs. Oh my fucking god.

– The house came with a riding mower. I was so proud of myself for figuring out how to drive it (I have yet to master a manual transmission car), and got about 10 minutes of mowing done before the thing died and refused to start up again. It then sat on my lawn for the rest of the summer as a sort of ornament. It wasn’t until late October I paid someone to come take a look at it and found out, hey, lawn tractors need fuel too! What’s with everything in the country needing fuel?? It actually needed some other fixing, too, though. Since the grass growing season was essentially over anyway, I got it repaired just in time to roll it back into the shed until next spring.

– Since the lawn tractor was no help at all, I went out and bought an electric mower. It worked well, but didn’t run for as long as the manufacturer’s writeup claimed it would on a battery charge. So I basically had to mow my lawn every single day, for as long as the battery would hold out, then plug it back in until the next day. The lawn became my own personal Boulder of Sisyphus. Every day I would mow, and every day there would be more grass and weeds. I dubbed an entire section of lawn “the back 40″ and decided it really didn’t need mowing after all; I would leave it as a small nature preserve. I managed to finally finish the portion of lawn that I felt really needed to be mowed, for aesthetic reasons, by the end of summer.

– One day, there was a swarm of ladybugs in the upstairs bathroom. I don’t know where they came from, how they got in, but months later, I’m still finding random ladybugs around the house.

– Thoughts of snow were never far from my mind, even in the heat of summer. About a month ago, it suddenly occurred to me that, because my driveway opens directly onto a highway (well, what passes for a highway in New Hampshire; it’s 2-lane blacktop), the highway snow plows were going to wall me off after every storm. So I would either need to make arrangements to have someone deal with that for me, or stay home during every snowstorm, because if I were out when a storm started, I’d be unable to get back to my own house. I’m still working on how exactly I’m going to communicate this fact to my employer.

– The first real snowfall of the season occurred last weekend. Although I was working 6-7 days a week, I made an executive decision and tore myself away from the computer long enough to drive to Lowe’s (what in the name of all that is holy did homeowners do before Lowe’s was invented?) to buy a snowblower. Actually, I bought the snowblower online, then went to Lowe’s to pick it up. And no, I had never laid eyes on, let alone handled, a snowblower before. I bought a big one. It’s shiny and red, and its web description sounded like it can blow lots of snow. When I asked the nice man in the store if he could help me load it into the back of my Subaru, there was surprisingly little hesitation when he said “No!” Hmmmm. Apparently, snowblowers are larger than I had imagined. Fortunately, Lowe’s rents trucks! I’ve driven a truck before. Twice, in fact!! Never a flatbed with a cage, though. With a very big, shiny, red snowblower rolling back and forth and repeatedly smashing into the back of the cab because I scoffed at the nice man’s suggestion of tying the snowblower down. Also, my timing was impeccable: the snow started while I was driving the truck. I found that the possibility of imminent death via driving accident/braining by snowblower added an air of real excitement to the day! I was having a great time!! I found some random radio station playing classic 70’s and 80’s heavy metal, and roared across the New Hampshire countryside, screaming like a banshee, in the driving snow, with my snowblower trying its darnedest to join me in the truck cab and enter the back of my skull. Woohoo!!!!!

– Four days ago, we got the first real snowstorm of the season; my town supposedly got 8.5 inches. I had planned ahead, and stopped at Lowe’s (a different one this time; fortunately, every New Hampshire city has a Lowes) the night before and bought a gas can. I had never actually handled a gas can before, or attempted to put gas into one. I hope no one at the Shell station flung a match on the ground after my first attempt at filling said gas can, what with all the splashing around of highly combustible fluid. The day of the storm, I didn’t even bother trying to drive to work, I just worked from home, nonstop, from dawn to midnightish. So there wasn’t a lot of wiggle room in there to try out the snowblower.

– Three days ago, I got up at dawn (well, I do that anyway, but it sounds more dramatic to say “got up at dawn”), hoping to get my driveway cleared before my first conference call of the day. I knew that the gasoline I had managed to get into the gas can (mostly) needed to go into the snowblower somehow. And there was a place for a key, and a string to pull, and an electric starter option. The nice man at Lowe’s had said a LOT of other stuff about “priming”, “augurs”, “choke”, “shear pins”, etc., but about the only thing I retained was that I should under no circumstances stick my hand into the snow chute; I should use the plastic stick thingie to clear clogs. So I read the user manual over my morning coffee. Then I went outside and circled the snowblower warily, sort of letting it know who’s boss without actually engaging in direct contact with it. Then I went inside for more coffee. After a hopeful but pathetic attempt to avoid the necessity of actually using the snowblower at all by just smashing down almost a foot of fluffy snow with my car by trying to drive through it to the road (I did make it a good three feet before getting stuck!), I eventually did succeed in starting my snow blower (after once again splashing quite a bit of gasoline around). I was so pleased with myself, I really wanted to go inside and rest for a while, but the manual said I should not leave my snowblower unattended with the engine running. So there was nothing left to do but actually start plowing, which turned out to not be all that bad. I wore my gunowner’s hearing protection, pictured myself in the flannel shirt I do not own, and manfully plowed my quarter-mile driveway. It took three freakin’ HOURS (two in the morning, and one more on my lunch break), and my palms were bruised and my nails broke and my arms still ache three days later, but dag nabbit, I did it!! I took a little victory lap in my car to nowhere in particular, just because I could.

During the break between hours 2 and 3 of snowblowing, I got a friendly call from PSNH (the New Hampshire gas and electric provider) informing me that my bill (which I had already noticed was late) had been returned to them by the post office, marked “mailbox down”. It wasn’t until I plowed all the way up to the highway that I discovered that the road plows had buried my mailbox in an ice wall and knocked it askew. My next door neighbor was even worse off; you could barely even see his mailbox anymore. I had neither the time nor the upper body strength left to even start to deal with that, so I just left it until the weekend.

Yesterday I trudged up my driveway, heavily bundled against a bitter-cold, windy day, with a snow shovel in my hand, on a mailbox rescue mission. I didn’t have the heart to fire up the snowblower again and figured I’d do it the old-fashioned way. I scrambled up the ice wall created by the highway plows and started digging around my mailbox. Parts of the ice wall could support my weight; the parts that couldn’t left me knee-deep in snow and in serious dangerous of leaving my boot behind when I managed to retrieve my foot. This floundering, scrabbling and sinking went on for some time, until I finally managed to unbury my mailbox enough to discover that its post wasn’t actually broken, just tipped over. The post was embedded in a block of cement. Now maybe if I hadn’t exhausted my arms two days previously, and/or could get any sort of traction on the ice wall, I could have managed to move my mailbox, but as it was, I might as well have been attempting to drag my car. I managed to maneuver and slide it in such a way that it was sort of hanging at the edge of the ice wall, horizontally, and decided that that would just have to be good enough for the mailman. It was at this moment that a crusty old New Hampshire gentleman in an enormous pickup truck with a plow on the front pulled off the highway, rolled down his window, and gallantly asked “Need some help?” Throwing self-respect to the wind, I practically squealed “Yes, please!!!” Sixty seconds later, the mailman drove up and pulled over, directly in front of my knight in shining armor (who *did* have a flannel shirt, by the way). He handed me my mail, and I asked about this business of apparently needing to break down the ice wall created by the highway plow in order to receive mail service. He seemed quite apologetic but said yes. But he also said that he generally holds onto people’s mail after storms, figuring they need some time to dig out, and just brings it back the next day. It must have been a substitute who returned my PSNH bill the other day. So, all’s well that ends well! I got my mail, a total stranger plowed away the ice wall in front of my mailbox, and I went to Starbucks for a mocha.

And today, it started snowing again. The adventure continues…

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Primum non nocere is a Latin phrase that means “First, do no harm.” The phrase is sometimes recorded as primum nil nocere.

Nonmaleficence, which derives from the maxim, is one of the principal precepts that all medical students are taught in medical school and is a fundamental principle for emergency medical services around the world. Another way to state it is that “given an existing problem, it may be better to do nothing than to do something that risks causing more harm than good.” It reminds the physician and other health care providers that they must consider the possible harm that any intervention might do. It is invoked when debating the use of an intervention that carries an obvious risk of harm but a less certain chance of benefit. Since at least 1860, the phrase has been for physicians a hallowed expression of hope, intention, humility, and recognition that human acts with good intentions may have unwanted consequences. A closely related phrase is “Sometimes the cure is worse than the ill.” source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primum_non_nocere

A common statement made when liberty activists are arguing with one another about the best way to proceed is “At least we’re/they’re/he’s doing something.” I don’t know where this idea came from, but it sure makes me want to smack people upside the head sometimes, in hopes that some common sense will be jarred loose from whichever internal part of their brain it’s currently trapped. There are plenty of life scenarios where doing something is not necessarily better than doing nothing. If you’re overweight and out-of-shape, going out and running five miles is not better than staying on the couch, if those five miles trigger a heart attack in your shocked and unprepared body. If you’re in Vegas with your life savings in cash in your wallet, betting it all at the blackjack table isn’t necessarily safe, wise or better than doing nothing with it.

Now granted, we’re all operating with unknowns. Inside-the-system activists (which I will abbreviate as ITS) have never actually succeeded in getting someone like Ron Paul elected to the Presidency (or a governorship… or a Senate seat… or even a Congressional district outside of Bumfuck, TX). If something miraculous happened and this occurred tomorrow, there would undoubtedly be unexpected hurdles and side effects prior to achieving the presumed goal of making our society freer (like, oh, say, the President still has to deal with CONGRESS). Outside-the-system activists (which I will abbreviate as OTS) have never (talking about the last 50 years in the U.S. here, not the whole history of history) actually succeeded in making a state or a town free of the coercive grasp of government. I could write a whole science fiction novella about the possible ramifications of the abrupt removal of coercive government from a community unprepared and ill-equipped to handle that, but I’ll save myself some time and just refer you back to the news coverage of the aftermath of Katrina, where the jackals of human society lost no time feeding off their slower and weaker neighbors.

What’s my point? We’re all operating with imperfect information, and no one truly knows the quickest, best path to creating a free society. (Freeing yourself is a different subject which numerous philosophers, political thinkers and spiritual leaders have addressed elsewhere; for starters, I refer you to the excellent How I Found Freedom In An Unfree World by the late, great Harry Browne ). But to blindly argue that all strategies are equally valid, and doing something is always better than doing nothing, is to willfully turn off the analytical, pattern-recognizing part of your brain that can project likely outcomes from actions not yet taken.

Ben Franklin advised: Do not squander time for that is the stuff life is made of. I see people in both the ITS and OTS groups running around like chickens with their heads cut off, breathlessly doing something and acting self-righteous about it. If you’ve thought about what you’re doing, believe you know what the consequences will be, and you like those consequences, then more power to you. If you’re not sure, or haven’t even begun to think about it, your brain is your friend and wants you to use it.

Another thing: back seat drivers. We all hate them. However, to argue that if someone doesn’t live in New Hampshire, and/or is not engaged in the specific type of activism in which I am engaged, they cannot possibly have anything of value to say to me about what is going on here… I mean, seriously? Are we that full of ourselves? The beauty and power of media (the written word, and more recently, audio and video) is that it enables us to communicate asynchronously with people in other times and places, and to, God forbid, learn from someone else’s insights or wisdom. Why not keep an open mind when advice or critiques are offered?

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Observers of the Free State Project are undoubtedly aware that civil disobedience has been growing in popularity as a method of promoting limited/no government in New Hampshire. I have been struggling with this concept for, well, crap, years now. It’s been just over three years since I expressed some befuddlement over why someone would choose to get arrested. All of a sudden, in a paranoid and hungover blast of clarity, I think I get it.

The goal of civil disobedience is communication.

Allow me to continue to milk the Matrix-is-a-metaphor-for-the-21st-century cow. We are born slaves. Within moments of birth, we are taken away from our mother’s (hopefully) loving arms and isolated in a glass box, tended (hopefully) by frazzled, overworked strangers. If we’re male, the end of our penis might be cut off… for our own “health”, or because that’s what God wants. Within weeks, we’re probably carried by our parents to a temple of some sort where we are lifted into the air in front of family and friends and a public apology is made for our very existence. Our innate evilness and unworthiness is proclaimed. Some sort of voodoo priest in ceremonial garb then sprinkles magic water on us, says an incantation, and suddenly we’re not evil anymore.

At this point, if we had the mental maturity to comprehend what was going on around us, we might very well be considering the possibility that the events of our first few weeks of life don’t bode particularly well for the years ahead… which are all about control.

First, you must learn to control your body. You may only release waste in authorized areas. You may only cry and scream in designated areas. You must lie down and try to sleep at specified times.

Next, you learn to not notice that your mind is being controlled. You must report to location X at exactly clock-time Y. You must think about the multiplication table. Or George Washington. Or sharing your toy. You may only speak to your friends at designated times. You may not laugh, cry, shout, or go to sleep, outside of designated places and times. You must use your “indoor voice”. You must learn to walk single-file. You must follow instructions, whatever they may be. If you don’t, you will be beaten and/or drugged.

Childhood prepares you for adulthood, at which point you are expected to become a productive slave. (In true Orwellian fashion, the State will refer to you as a “consumer” rather than a “producer”.) Find a niche within the global industrial complex, perform some sort of service which may or may not meet any actual human need, and give over half of your pay to the State. Have children, and plug them promptly into the Matrix… or they will be removed from your care. When they reach physical maturity, the State may request that one or more of them travel to a distant area and engage in mortal combat with some people, for some reason. You are to consider this a mark of great pride. Comply, always using your “indoor voice” and walking in single file, or be imprisoned.

As in the Matrix, the State has Agents. Treat them very gingerly. So much as present the appearance of a physical threat to one of them, and you will be swiftly tasered or shot.

If, for whatever reason, a red pill has made its way down your throat, you may choose to chip away at various facets of the Matrix by, for example, not putting your children in public school; not drugging your children… or yourself; not buying into the Judgmental-Old-Guy-in-the-Sky form of control. I don’t mean to denigrate any of these activities; I applaud them. But all of these things don’t change the fundamental fact that you’re a SLAVE.

You may choose to engage in electoral politics, running for office or helping others to do so. Writing bills, or fighting bills. The State loves this strategy. You expend your limited time, income and energy in an utterly futile attempt to replace a few low-level bureaucrats with slightly less restrictive individuals. Ultimately, this changes nothing. You, and everyone you know, remain a SLAVE. (And please don’t forget to use your “indoor voice” in the Legislative Office Building.)

There is only one way to kill the Matrix: unplug enough of the people who feed it. Enable them to see the world for what it is, rather than for what they have been led to believe it is. Ironically, no one can be forced to unplug. All sorts of evidence may be laid in front of someone’s eyes, but if they choose not to see it or to grasp its implications, there’s nothing you can do about it. (Exhibit A: Zeitgeist, the Movie ) All you can do is get your pirate signal out there, over and over, and hope that enough people will hear it, and will listen.

Which brings me back (finally!) to civil disobedience. I’ve blogged here before that it doesn’t seem like a good time to me to hang out in jail; sitting in court, paying fines, and dealing with paperwork doesn’t sound all that great, either. I’ve been baffled by those of my friends who intentionally tweak the noses of Agents in various ways to willfully get themselves arrested. CD is self-destructive, sacrificing a bit of your own precious life for the benefit of others. That’s a charitable interpretation; a less charitable one is that some people derive adolescent pleasure out of sticking it to “the Man”, getting a friend to film it, and hoping they look cool when it’s posted on YouTube. And some people simply let their authority issues overwhelm their good sense, needlessly getting themselves into trouble. (My mother used to refer to this as “cutting off your nose to spite your face”.) The monk who set himself on fire to protest the Vietnamese government’s treatment of Buddhists is one of the world’s most famous civil disobeyers; his image has become iconic. A guy who took a picture of the incident won a Pulitzer. But the monk himself is, you know… dead now.

So why do it? A well-executed act of civil disobedience is a pirate broadcast. It sends a message out into the Matrix, which some will notice, and a smaller number will hear. It shines a light on the Matrix itself, enabling those ensnared within it to observe its clinging invisible mesh. It reminds the viewer, if only for a moment, that something as trivial as failing to use your “indoor voice” can result in ludicrously excessive punishment. Ideally, it makes the viewer wonder what life might be like outside of the Matrix.

So where does all this leave me, your faithful first-person-narrative confessional-tone blogger? I swallowed the Red Pill a year and a half ago, and have spent the time since shell-shocked and sulking in a corner of the Nebuchadnezzar, eating slop that may or may not taste like Cream of Wheat, glaring at those still trapped in the Matrix and blaming them for their own predicament. Productive….. not!

I’m not about to rush out and battle an Agent; I am no Trinity. Call me craven, but I fully intend to run (pay, bow, kneel, suck, whatever it takes) to avoid getting tased or caged. But I also intend to find a way to boost the pirate signal, to make myself useful and, hopefully, free the minds of at least a few more people.

Wake up.

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tribe - noun any aggregate of people united by ties of descent from a common ancestor, community of customs and traditions, adherence to the same leaders, etc.

They came from the Seacoast (on the eastern border), Salem (on the southern border), and Winchester (on the western border). They came from the city (Manchester) and the country (Barnstead, Grafton). They came from all over New Hampshire, by way of states all over the U.S. (Maine, Washington, California, South Carolina, Kansas, Georgia). They came to help me move into my new home.

None of my blood relatives came to help me (in fact, none of them even did me the courtesy of acknowledging that I’d invited them to do so). None of my coworkers, some of whom I respect and enjoy, and some of whom live in the same town as me and told me they’d help me, actually showed up to do so. But every single New Hampshire Porcupine, to a person, who told me they’d come to help me, kept their word and did so. Several brought their children, and put them to work as well. Kids hauled my garbage, searched my house to find where my shell-shocked cats were hiding, and planted a shrub in my garden as a housewarming gift. Every single one of these people could have found a more enjoyable way to spend a beautiful warm Saturday (it was even the birthday of two of the kids (twins)).

These people are my tribe. I have a tribe! One and only one thing unites us, but that one thing is enough: the realization that we don’t need government. That, in fact, government usually/always (opinions differ on this point) does more harm than good. The government certainly didn’t help me move. It didn’t carry any furniture down my stairs. It didn’t come over, shake my hand, hand me a business card, and say “I live down the street. If you ever need anything, call me.” It didn’t rent me a truck (a private business did that). It didn’t provide me a modern-day place to “hunt and gather” enough “bananas” with which to buy a house (four entrepreneurs who founded and run my company did that). All it did was leave a nasty note on my car for I’m not sure what reason (parking too long on a public street by the U-Haul office?) warning me that if I didn’t move it soon, I’d get towed.

The actual move took very little time: about 45 minutes on the loading end, 30 minutes on the unloading end. The rest of the afternoon was spent eating, drinking, joking, gossiping and debating political philosophy. And when it comes right down to it, that’s what life is all about. There are certain timeless and universal truths. Babies are cute. Cats do funny things. Charred meat and beer taste good. People fall in, and out, of love. And we hairless apes still, after, what, 6 million years?, are arguing about how best to live together in relative peace without stealing each other’s bananas. And that’s OK! So maybe the occasional four-letter word was shouted (in front of the children, no less!). Each of us respects the others’ right to keep the bananas they’ve picked themselves.

For the first time in a long time, I have a sense of hope. I suddenly understand on a different level that it’s not about improving the government, or finding a way to coopt it, or take it over, or defeat it. It’s about learning to work with it, or around it, or flat-out IGNORING it. And in the meantime, we’re teaching our children, and earning our livings, and building our homes, and living our lives. Good, decent lives. With gossip. And beer.

Excuse me for quoting a politician, but it really is a good line: Government is not a solution to our problem, government is the problem. If you, like us, understand that… and also understand that there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch (aka TANSTAAFL), that you need to find an honest way to earn a living and put a roof over your head and bananas in your belly… then I invite you to join us here in New Hampshire. (But please, don’t come if you haven’t grasped both halves of that last sentence; we have ways of dealing with those types…)

Join the Free State Project now.

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Three years ago today, I blogged about how I was leaving the Libertarian Party and becoming politically independent. To paraphrase the Dead, what a long strange trip it’s been since then.

Today, I’m declaring a different kind of independence, and one that I believe is more significant than a political party affiliation or lack thereof. I spent the day moving some of my crap into my new home, the first house I have ever owned. Owning my own home has extreme emotional, almost mythical, significance for me. While most little girls were playing with baby dolls and dreaming of their wedding day, I was playing with my extensive collection of toy horses and dreaming of owning my own ranch. Laura Ingalls was my imaginary friend (really). OK, maybe there was some less wholesome play with my Ken doll and a bevy of blond plastic vixens, but let’s stay on topic, shall we?

Not only am I moving into a new house, I’m moving into a completely new lifestyle. I spent my childhood living in a succession of utterly stereotypical 3-BR suburban ranch houses, and my adulthood in a succession of apartments, shared flats, and shared houses, all in cities. Now, I live on a “mail carrier rural route”! I have my own sources of water and heat, and enough land and vegetation to raise my own produce, dairy, and even brew my own maple syrple if I want. Of course, I’m not focused on any of that right now; I’m focused on when is the Internet getting turned on (40 hours, not that I’m counting or anything). I may be a country geekgrrl now, but they’ll take my high speed phat pipe from my cold, dead hands!!!

I’ve never been responsible for care and upkeep of my own place of residence before. If something broke, Daddy fixed it. Or the University fixed it. Or the landlord fixed it. Or the property management company fixed it. Now, if something breaks, *I* fix it, or go without. Considering I had trouble figuring out how to open a f@@@ing bird feeder earlier today, I’m thinking I have a LOT to learn. I’d better stop drinking; I need every remaining brain cell.

I’m not so deluded as to think I’m truly independent and self-sufficient. I can’t produce all my own food, and have no interest in even trying; it’s far more efficient (and less strenuous) for me to stare at a computer monitor all day and then pay somebody else to produce my food. And while I know I can get by without electricity, I have no intention of living that lifestyle unless things get really Bibliddy and apocalyptic. As for defending myself by actually putting a bullet into another human being, I honestly don’t know if I’ve got it in me, and hope to never need to find out.

So now, with a sore back and aching muscles I didn’t know I had (nothing like wrangling a 55-lb dehumidifier down the basement stairs in 70% humidity; good times), I declare my independence…

– from the municipal water system
– from the electrical grid for heating purposes (have to work on removing that prepositional clause)
– from the municipal waste hauling system
– from any lingering false sense of security provided by the close proximity of city cops
– from spoiled obliviousness of the basic workings of common household appliances
– from scraping ice off the car windows at oh-dark-thirty AM (yessssssssss)
– from carrying 30-lb bags of kitty litter up two flights of stairs
– from air conditioning and electric dishwashers

Just kidding on that last one. Homegirl NEEDS A/C and a dishwasher.

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