October 16, 2003

Let me introduce myself, one of the founders of The Price of Liberty.org. I thought that my story might inspire others who are struggling with the questions of "left" vs. "right" and wondering what else there could be that makes more sense.

So, just who is this guy with the strange name and questionable writing style? Just who is ZooT_aLLures?

I wasn't raised in a freedom minded environment, but rather in the ghettos of a big city in the upper Midwest.

Mom and Dad were young and foolish, and more importantly Catholic, which at that time precluded the use of any form of birth control other than the rhythm method or an aspirin held tightly between the knees. They had four kids by age thirty and a fifth at age forty+

Neither Mom nor Dad had any real job skills other than the ability to do physical labor, and therefore we were poor-- hence living in the ghetto. Dad didn't seem to have much sense at that time, but a lot of pride, and was prone to losing jobs for using obscenities when discussing attendance and or attitude problems. This led to us living on welfare quite a bit.

I did very well in school in the early years and scored high in the madden-peak standard achievement testing that was held every third year. I was offered enrollment in accelerated learning classes at other schools, but never lived in one place long enough for this to actually take place. I remember living in 16 different houses in 15 years.

Yup -- I grew up as a socialist!

Well, then came late teen years and the drug culture, and living in the streets; going from job to job and all the other wonderful things that young wild life is all about. After all, why should one worry about working steady when one can go to their local welfare office and get a handful of money so as to finance at least a few days of partying?

Yet there was something wrong. My friends were growing up. They were moving away and getting married, working, with some even going to prison or committing suicide. Yet a certain core group of rejects, me included, remained. We were never getting anywhere.

At about the age of twenty five I noticed something new; the core group didn't want anyone to leave and anyone trying to leave was quickly invited back in via middle of the night visits bearing gifts of booze and drugs.

At about age twenty seven I met a woman and at 29 did the smartest yet dumbest thing I've ever done, both after and before -- I got married. About age thirty I got my first real long term job.

Now, it's not that my wife was a bad person or anything, she was a good person. She wanted kids, yet wasn't willing to do what it would take for her to have kids. (And it's NOT what you think*L*) She thought that she still lived in the 50's and should stay home, even though I wasn't earning enough to support us in any suitable manner, so the credit card bills and other debts grew and grew. During those first few years we probably spent $50k on experimental (ask our insurance company) fertility drugs which also helped dig the grave for our marriage.

About this time we were introduced to the friendly folks from the local department of social services and the child protection services. We were told we were a shoe-in to be foster parents. She went for it hook, line, and sinker, and I only begrudgingly agreed, although I really can't say why. I guess I really didn't want a bunch of kids running around.

They ran us through all the psych tests, and home inspections, and all the other question and answer games, and we were granted a license. Soon after that we were asked if we'd consider being an "emergency placement facility". If anyone wonders what an emergency placement facility is, it is a place where social workers and cops may call 24 hours a day and expect you to jump out of bed and go to where they have the kids you've been volunteered into taking, then picking them up with any possessions they might have at that time. Usually this means a kid or kids in a diaper, with nothing else except maybe head lice.

I often wondered how these kids managed to get from their homes to the police station or DSS center wearing nothing but a diaper in the middle of winter.

After a few years of this I began to note several things. First, that the state stopped asking and started telling. The second was that, as foster parents, we were required to attend various educational courses and that ideas given by foster parents during these courses were sometimes later adopted as DSS policy, with the most outrageous ideas being the most likely to be adopted.

The third and most disturbing, I noticed that while several dozen kids went through our house over this span of time, not one was returned to his/her own family. My wife thought this was because these people were simply too screwed up to be parents, which could have been vindictiveness on her part considering that we had no kids of our own.

Me? Well I grew up in that world, and while many were drunks and junkies, the majority were just dirt poor, uneducated people. They had no idea of what was really going on and, therefore, tried to fight in an inappropriate manor which got them into trouble with DSS and lost their kids for good. This horrified me, but I was doing the foster parent thing for the sake of the kids, not the parents. The parents were the problem and I thought the state was the cure.

One time when talking to a case worker, I replied to some comment of hers: "When will somebody stop worrying so much about "rights" and start doing what's right?"

One time we delivered a kid to its home for an "unscheduled home visit", after getting permission to do this from the case worker, so this kid could attend a family reunion. Four hours later when we went back to pick up the kid, the entire house was empty and the entire family simply vanished. We reported this and were interviewed by the cops, and then the DSS people for a few hours. The caseworker finally said: "Don't worry about it, they're probably out of state by now and not our problem anymore".

First I was relieved that we weren't going to get into trouble, and then shocked that this kid was nothing more than an object to the caseworker. Finally, I was angered that we, who could make more money running a paper route than we would ever be paid for foster parenting, cared far more about this kid's future than the caseworker whose job it was to care about the kids.

On the way home, an involuntary smile came across my face, and I told my wife, "Well there's finally one that got away." She was not happy with my words, as I said, but I smiled about the DSS for the first time in several years.

I turned into a workaholic, not wanting to be at work, but referring the noise which could be ignored at work to the noise that couldn't be blocked out at home. The only time I ever really found peace and quiet in those days was in my car on the way to or from work, or when I crawled inside of a bottle of whiskey or a bowl of good dope.

Something else was going on about that time. My boss introduced me to a scandalsheet called "The Spotlight" and started talking to me quietly about "the state". Yes, there was a lot of trash in it, but there were also jewels about liberty, freedom, and sovereignty, as well as government's fight to take these things away. There were editorials, and I found myself relating to the opinions of these right wing extremists far more than the left wingers of the DSS system.

I read about such things as the "Bilderburgs" and the "Illumnati" and other "secret conspiracies", and they seemed plausible. There "had" to be some explanation for the downward spiral I could see in society as a whole. I followed this scandalsheet and started reading every issue. More dangerously, I started talking about it, both at home, and at the DSS. Needless to say, I didn't impressed anyone there.

It never occurred to me the I was part of the problem, and that I was standing on the wrong side of "the line". Almost 20 years later I was still a statist, but beginning to see a light. What light? I didn't know, but there was something there. Some spark was kindled in the sea of confusion between my ears.

Over the next few years the company I worked for closed, and my wife and I divorced. Then I discovered computers and the internet. I went from left wing extremist to right wing extremist in three years, getting closer to that "unexplained light" and then -- for no good reason -- moving away again. Yes, part of the "moral majority", with all of its open hatred of anything that those folks consider to be immoral, yet up until that point my whole life had been immoral, and a target of their hatred.

These folks "talked" about freedom and liberty, but always tempered these ideas by adding their own rules to limit freedom and liberty. Although I felt more at home with the right wing than "those dirty socialist left wing liberals" the light seemed to be growing dimmer, and the ideas and thoughts gleaned from the internet and the "Spotlight" about freedom and liberty seemed to be moving further away. My love affair with the right wing was short indeed.

About that time I noticed that there were internet sites that, while being predominantly right wing, were still human in their thoughts and message. Considering that I had taken the time to learn the unixlike operating systems, and self taught myself a smattering of perl, html, and C I started volunteering to do some system admin tasks for these sites. This went on for several years.

I cheered when Bush got elected, with his promises of a smaller government, and more humble foreign policy, and cheered even harder that the socialists were put out in the cold.

Just imagine: a foster parent and a member of liberal society, then later a moral majority member with a booze and drug habit. Pure economic pressures put an end to the drugs, and the booze was never much of a problem, but I'll bet there's a million folks spinning in their graves at the very thought of it.

That light still evaded me. Being right wing wasn't much more rewarding than being left wing, and in fact I found that both the right and the left shared a common bond. They both didn't like some things, and were vocal about those things, and they both felt it was the job of government to make these things disappear -- no matter what it took.

As time went on, I gave up doing work for most of the internet sites, except one, and only worked there because it was on a dedicated server, so it didn't have the limitations imposed by most hosting services. For the most part I was free do do what I wanted, when I wanted. Having been interested almost from the time I discovered the internet in direct communications between people, I became interested in the internet forums and message boards. I even gave a few tries at running a chatroom. On these boards, I read the various arguments between right wingers and left wingers and found most of their arguments to be self-centered and extremely biased towards their personal agenda or the collective agenda of their alignment whether right or left.

Yet every once in a while I'd see someone asking about the base legitimacy of government. These posts always intrigued me, as both the right and the left were nothing but two sides to the same coin, and it seemed that there was something better out there.

The site that I was working with talked a lot about liberty and freedom, and just as much about conservatism, and "chaining government to the constitution". I thought that this was OK at the time and the right had better ideas about the individual than the left -- yet in both cases they felt that only "their group" had the ability to hold the chains of power and only their group knew what was best for everyone else. Only their group? I had a hard time swallowing that concept; one ideology that could define law for everyone? Was that the freedom and liberty I'd heard so much about?

One day I was woke up to a very important event. My girlfriend called me from work, and told me "they're flying airplanes into buildings in New York!" Being half asleep I replied "COOL!" and turned on my TV. I found that they had indeed flown an airplane into a building in New York, and at that time there were at least three other airplanes off their courses.

The website was really going wild that day and all the forum people, regardless of political leanings, were all chanting in unison: "Kill em' all"! At the tavern after work everyone was chanting in unison, "kill em all". In fact, everywhere I went everyone was saying, "kill em all".

And one lone voice on the net asked "why?"

Later that night we were called into the office at work. We all got to sit down and watch the president's speech. I heard about how the bad guys hated our freedoms and liberties, and then I realized the whole reason for the speech when G.W. said, "You must live your lives as normal, and you must continue to shop." ARRRGH!!!!

The entire internet was abuzz with all sorts of opinion and even more nonsense than usual, with the left blaming the right because the right was in power at that time, and the right blaming the left, because they "were" in power for 8 years and their "legacy" caused these things to happen.

And still that one lone voice out there asking "why"?

I was coming closer to that light again. To this day I don't know who that lone voice belonged to and probably never will, but to that person I owe a great debt, because I then asked myself, "why?" It took me all of about 15 seconds to answer that question. It was all around me and had been for years if only I had noticed.

The web site, while still talking freedom with a right wing slant, started focusing on more and more trivial issues of local interest and less on the country as a whole or freedom as a universal concept. In the meantime, our country burned and plundered Afghanistan and Iraq, and people waved little paper flags and felt oh so patriotic while soldiers murdered people over there in our name.

And the election year began to creep up on us. Slowly, freedom and liberty took a back seat. The quiet voice of reason was overwhelmed with the shrieks of insanity, as some people were willing to ignore all the events of the last 150 years to promote getting their group back in power, therefore giving them the ability to forge more of the chains that everyone else will have to wear. What they professed to be truth six months prior suddenly were called illusions created by the other group to muddy the waters. The "truth" became that their guy was the only legitimate person to be in power, all the while either apologizing for or ignoring their previous lies. The original themes of individual liberty and responsibility were seldom seen.

It was time to leave that site and it was those posts that questioned the base legitimacy of government, the anarchists, that gave me inspiration..

Yes, I know. People always get these dopey mental pictures of some Abby Hoffman wannabe wearing tie-dyed t-shirts and planning to lace the city water supply with LSD or something stupid like that. That's what we've been programmed to equate with anarchism. Sorry there folks, it's just another lie.

Government can't fight individual liberty in any other manner than to build comically frightening pictures of anything that threatens their hold on people. Anarchism is a concept absolutely alien to them so they must picture it as a life of savage grunts and snuffling of beasts rooting at the ground. In other words, a total waste.

In reality, anarchy is quite simply a political ideology based upon the concept that people can live together without someone forcing them to behave themselves or respect one another. It's the idea that people aren't inherently evil anymore than they are inherently good, and instead that for the most part they do treat others as they themselves wish to be treated, and only become violent or aggressive when in the presence of violent or aggressive people and being exposed to violent aggressive acts. I believe that people don't need rulers, and when forced to have rulers, use those rulers and their rules as justification to commit less than honorable acts under the pretense of legality rather than morality. Doing unto others what is legal, simply because it's legal, and therefore they bear no responsibility nor liability for their actions.

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. I suspect that at least a few of the "founding fathers" were themselves devout anarchists.

(Editor's note: There are as many different definitions of "anarchy" as there are of "liberal" and "conservative", not all of them accurate. Each person must leave everyone else to find their own definition and how it relates to their lives. The one thing anarchists have in common is a rejection of centralized government of any kind. Do some research and discover your own definition. Just don't swallow anyone else's without some serious thought and investigation.)

Resources:

The basic tenet of anarchism is that hierarchical authority -- be it state, church, patriarchy or economic elite -- is not only unnecessary, but is inherently detrimental to the maximization of human potential. Anarchists generally believe that human beings are capable of managing their own affairs on the basis of creativity, cooperation, and mutual respect. It is believed that power is inherently corrupting, and that authorities are inevitably more concerned with self-perpetuation and increasing their own power than they are with doing what is best for their constituents.
Liz A. Highleyman, "An Introduction to Anarchism"

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