by Eric Peters

March 20, 2024 - There was a time when many Amerikans admired people who weren’t servile. Some still do. But there are also a lot of people (I wouldn’t call them Amerikans) who resent those who aren’t servile - and applaud when such people are “taught a lesson”.

One such lesson was meted out to a Florida woman who had the temerity to assert her right to travel freely. The right most Amerikans now consider a conditional privilege for which they must beg the government’s permission to be allowed. Earlier generations regarded it differently. Thomas Jefferson did not need a riding license to travel by horse from Monticello to Boston. George Washington’s carriage didn’t have to have license plates, either. Both - and everyone else, back then - availed themselves of what was considered by everyone to be the public right-of-way.

Then along came the government. It paved over what had been the rights-of-way and asserted ownership over them, rendering those who use them people who must do so according to the government’s rules. It’s not even “the government”- as if such an entity had any real existence. It is nothing more than the relative handful of people who exert control over the roads and thereby assert ownership of them.

Amerikans - many of them - have been taught to believe they own a thing if they have a piece of paper saying it’s theirs; and of course it doesn’t even say that. It says they have title to the thing - which is a very different thing. Unless you have absolute, legally respected control over something - more finely, if no other person has the legal power to exert control over the thing - then you don’t really own it, do you?

The government describes the roads it now controls as the “public” roads - a thing as greasily dishonest as the sly way government schools are characterized as “public”; and we know who controls them, too.

Back to the right to travel freely on what used to be the public right-of-way and the Florida woman who made the mistake of doing just that. Armed government workers - the costumed gorillas who enforce the government’s control over the things you’re allowed to use (as well as many other things besides) saw that the woman had committed what is styled a “moving violation,” which is kind of like a kid inadvertently stepping on a crack in the sidewalk and not breaking her momma’s back. That is to say, a “rule” was broken.

She - the woman, not the girl - made a right on red.

No one’e person or property was hurt in any way but - nonetheless - this is an illegal act in many states. Cue the gorillas. They “pulled her over,” a gentle-sounding phrase that soft-peddles the murderous violence implicit in being “pulled over”. If you doubt this, don’t pull over sometime and see what happens next.

Anyhow, the woman pulled over. It was then that the State’s gorillas discovered she did not have the State’s permission slip to drive, nor the required “plates” on her vehicle, which are the functional equivalent of the ear tags ranchers staple into place on the ears of their cattle.

The woman questioned the gorillas’ mandate to “pull her over” - and their assertion that she was in “violation” because her vehicle was not properly ear-tagged and she herself could not produce the identification-cum-permission-slip (i.e., that thing they call a driver’s license) demanded by them.

It did not matter that she had harmed no one. It did not matter that she had not even plausibly appeared to be on the verge of maybe harming someone. What mattered was showing her who’s boss. By showing her - most forcefully - that neither she nor any other person have any right to travel freely on the government’s roads.

She was dragged out of her vehicle and thrown on the road by one of the gorillas and then placed in manacles, as if she’d done something wrong as opposed to something “illegal”, the latter being a moral non sequitur of a piece with ignoring the warning label on the mattress you just bought and tearing it off.

Bad enough.

Gorillas, after all, will be gorillas - especially when they are rewarded for being gorillas; and the government will be the government.

Expecting it to be a benign entity that exists only by common consent and to only act aggressively when the person or property of an innocent person is harmed in some way is a lot like the old story about the frog that was dismayed when the scorpion he’d helpfully allowed to ride his back across the creek stung him along the way.

But there is something even more dismaying. It is the way some people cheer what the government does - especially to others, when they “break the law”, not realizing they are cheering the government doing it to them, too. We saw this lit brightly during the government-imposed “mask” mania during the (nonexistent) “pandemic.” Store managers and teenage cashiers were vicious enforcers of the mania.

They had to wear them, so you’d better.

“It seems like it’s locos all around in the case of south Florida’s sovereign citizens versus the police,” snarks a writer for Jalopnik, the car site that regularly publishes articles criticizing those who drive them, especially without permission.

Misery truly does love company.