Who Are We, and What Are We Doing here?
by Henry Nicolle
Exclusive first publishing granted to The Seattle Sinner August, 2007
 

This essay addresses the Death and Resurrection of the Great American Experiment (Our Cannibal Society)

Our purposes for governing our society are to secure our inherent rights, preserve our liberty to freely exercise our rights and to maintain an environment for our self-determination as free individuals and as a free society. Our Constitutions establish the methods allowed for those purposes. Among those methods are specific protections to secure the essentials of a free society: individual liberty to travel, to own, use and dispose of individual property and to be free of annoyance by people trusted to govern.

I was stopped recently by a police woman. Technically, the "crime" was a “Traffic Infraction”. I was jailed and placed naked, in the “Penalty Box”. (The curious can read “The Politics of Changing a Light Bulb” by Ron Branson in TheSeattle Sinner News and Politics articles.).

California law defines “Public Offenses” as “Civil or Criminal”. As a “convenience to the accused”, Constitutional protections in criminal prosecution have been eliminated for infraction cases. Our State Supreme Court has ruled that “a ‘quasi-criminal’ offense does not exist in California law” and that “Infractions are not criminal offenses and ‘Traffic Infractions’ do not even rise to the level of ‘Public Offense’”. Interestingly, no specific authority has been provided by California law to stop a Citizen who is not reasonably suspected of a “criminal” “Public Offense”.

“Big deal.” the experienced street denizen might say. “Break the Law, go to jail,” the conventional and cynical may agree. This attitude explains and justifies societal cannibalism. Taxation and regulation of individual labor, travel and property are the primary tools for aggregation of wealth and social control by the people who govern us. We are told that these deceits and thefts are necessary to maintain our society. If we don’t always agree, we do not often question or complain.

Who have we become, to permit the essence of individual liberty to slip from our grasp? We have become a society of cannibal sheep, preying and feeding on the liberty, property and industry of our willing fellow Citizens. Liberty is never free, nor is it easy or safe. Liberty and government are the opposite poles of society’s character. The benefit and bane of government are the acts of individual people, not institutions. Government is incapable of any physical interaction with humans.

When government goes sour, the germ is in the sense of the men and women of the society. We have allowed individual rights and liberty to defer to submission to the demands of the village. We indulge in the sacrifice of the innocent to improve the Village because our lives and liberty within our consumer-society have become disposable social redundancies. Successful societies attribute their longevity to protection of individual freedom from organized theft and coercion. What is interesting about this truism is that tyranny, authoritarianism and confiscation of individual liberty and property for the public benefit are universally lauded by tyrants.

All of this rambling returns us to the point of this essay. “Who are we and what are we doing here?” We have no rights worth any serious discussion. Demonstrably, we are no longer free. Acknowledgment of these observations is unnecessary.

The Great American Experiment has failed.

A young woman with a gun stopped me with no identifiable or articulable legal authority. She had merely a show of presumed authority. There is no doubt that she and her associates would have killed me for her false personal presumption, had I not submitted to her demands. Her purpose was evolutionary, to enforce the custom of submission without resistance for the extraction of money without complaint. The submission was demanded and the money stolen for your benefit as a member of “society”, without justification and without the law.

Most of our State governments have recently adopted legislation which prohibits resistance to whatever demands are made by government men and women. One is required to accept unlawful indignations, beatings and even death without complaint, under the supposition that any harm done under color of law can be repaired after the fact by the victim or by the survivors of the victim.

Our governments are really just our families, friends and neighbors. When we allow a part of our society to prey upon the liberty and property of the rest of us in order to feed the demand of “social necessity”, we have become cannibals, feeding on the substance of our selves. This process is self-limiting.

Resurrection of the Great American Experiment demands the renewal of the Spirit of the Revolution of 1776. One might ask with all seriousness, “When does the shooting start?” Or not? Look around. Is anyone complaining?