Intrusion

Once upon a time, I was content to walk through life simply following the rules without thinking much about why the rules were what they were. At about 17, I started really looking around and questioning what I saw. My understanding of evil and its many faces has grown over the years, and my love of freedom has grown correspondingly.

The anger I feel at the massive intrusion on my life present in our system of government grows daily, it seems. Every time I hear about some new tracking scheme proposed, my anger ratchets up a notch. The latest suggestion I heard involved equipping all cars with GPS as a means to track just how much each car drove and on what roads, purportedly to determine the appropriate tax the registered owner should pay for road maintenance.

It says a lot, I think, that I jumped right to being really pissed off and resolved against ever complying with such a law, because there was never any hesitation in believing that it would be implemented by the .gov if at all possible. This is the same .gov that brands each citizen with a tracking number (your SSN), which it promised would never be used for any purpose but as a social security account number. I can’t even tell you how many accounts and records I have in various places that track me via my social security number. Most of them do.

This is the same .gov that routinely turns a blind eye toward its law enforcement agencies illegally networking various databases to more easily sift through the populace and find criminal suspects. The same .gov (broadly, this applies to states more than federal) that continually pushes gun registration programs, shell casing programs, and so on that I think have caught a grand total of five criminals in twenty years. The same .gov whose highest court barely agreed to recognize the innate right of the people to bear arms, 5 for, 4 against.

Maybe it’s irrational for me to try to keep a low profile anymore. I’m a trained infantryman with a combat tour who is on record for buying something like twenty guns (they don’t know about my heirlooms I bet), so I’m sure I’m on a dozen lists. Right wing gun nut, for sure. Be that as it may, I do not welcome further intrusion in my life. I want to simply live my life unimpeded, harming nobody. That might be too much to ask.

Back to the GPS thing… this is one more reason I like old cars. My 2001 Cherokee is too reliant on computers for me, even, and the Jeep line was about a decade behind other makes when it comes to computer integration. I like vehicles that I can fix myself with no outside help other than manuals. New cars make that impossible. I suspect I’ll be driving 1995 or older cars the rest of my life. There will never be any GPS in any of my cars. If government mandated lojack comes along, well, I guess it depends on how far the government is willing to go to find out where and when I drive.

Understand this: every law the government makes is enforceable by death. That’s the .gov trump card. Remember Ruby Ridge? Remember how that all started? Sawed off shotguns were the excuse the .gov used to destroy a family that wouldn’t cooperate with them. Lon Horiuchi, the sniper who center punched Vicki Weaver in the head, an unarmed woman holding a baby, was never punished in any way–other than not being allowed to be a sniper anymore. Know what would happen to me if I took a bad shot* and killed an innocent woman holding a baby in Iraq? If any brass at all found out, I would be facing a court martial and jail time, and rightly, except in a time of war there’s a hell of a lot more expectation of ’shit happens’ than in a stateside law enforcement action.

Force is the only option the government has. There are only two ways to get someone to do what you want, and they are force and persuasion. Explain to me how the government can possibly persuade someone to do something they don’t want to do without the threat of force and… well, I dunno. I’ll send you a prize, but I’m not worried about it. The difference between a disagreement between two rational, moral individuals and an individual and the government is with the .gov, there is never a no-force option for not complying. The .gov will not just give up and say alright, fine, don’t do it. They can’t, because then they would have no power over us.

Suppose we were neighbors and I asked you to pay for my rent four months a year. You, quite naturally, say “no, dude, what the hell would I do that for?” If I then forcibly evicted you from your house and killed you when you resisted, that would be called murder. Yet few look askance at the government doing the exact same thing.

Why?

*I actually faced a similar situation. On my very first small kill team operation in Iraq, my squad leader claimed a man in a field about 300m away was planting an IED–in a freaking field over 100m away from any road. He told me to shoot him. I refused because there was no way of confirming what he was doing and I sure as shit couldn’t see him anyway. Some people have earned my trust to take a shot like that on their word alone, but that guy wasn’t anywhere near, and he was acting pretty fucking bloodthirsty–he wanted the mission to end early, so any kill would do, in his mind. I deemed it an unlawful order and refused. Ahem, Lon Horiuchi, maybe you should have thought of that, instead of being a prick that couldn’t cope with the feeling of having the power of God in his hands–and couldn’t resist using it.