Recent Events

Note: this is an excerpt from my woods journal.

Monday and Tuesday, both days happily consumed by Nature. Yesterday was gray and wet but it did not dissuade me from going to the Tinker Brook Natural Area in Plymouth. This area is a small ravine dominated by a splendid brook that crashes over stones as it finds its way down the mountain. The rocky slopes around this brook contain some rare old growth trees, mainly red spruce and hemlock. Some of these trees are older than this state or country, and somehow survived the desolation inflicted upon Vermont in the years of development. These grand old trees are not the giant redwoods, etc., one finds in the West, but are nonetheless large and beautiful. They impress me with the power of Nature-for I am so small and short-lived in comparison to these trees. The ground here is carpeted with fine wildflowers: trilliums, bellworts, etc. Moose are abundant here, if their sign is any hint. The stormy weather has kept the mosquitoes at bay, but not the beautiful singing birds, all singing their thanks to their Creator, for to them this day is not bad but good.

Tuesday finds me at Birdseye again. The land is green and lush here, and the birds are singing loudly. The rain has let up and now and then the sun shines through the cloudy sky. The air is sweet with pine, courtesy of the young pine trees abundant here. The mosquitoes are out in full force seeking their life-giving blood, though they do not stop me.

Nature puts me at rest, granting peace- and yet I can't shake the pain of the human world from my heart. There is such tragedy unfolding. In Indiana, their supreme court has declared the right to resist LEO's acting unlawfully, dating back to the Magna Carta, extinct. Now there is no effective limit to the abuses of thugs, for even refusing consent to search, under this broadly written ruling, could be construed as resistance and unlawful.

In Arizona, a SWAT team in Tucson murdered a man in his own home. Sleeping after a graveyard shift, he was awoken by his wife, who saw men outside attempting to enter-without announcing themselves as police-and he grabbed a rifle to investigate. He was shot-over 70 rounds were fired by police-and then medical help was blocked for over an hour while he died, killing the most important witness. They initially lied that he had fired at them-he never even took the safety off his gun-and then admitted that was false. All of this in name of the War on Drugs, an attempt to control people that has failed as miserably as Prohibition did, and, no drugs were even found in his home. The great irony here is that this man was a veteran of Iraq, a soldier who inflicted this vile government's will on others, and was then killed by his own local government.

In Philadelphia, a man was open carrying a sidearm for protection, and was stopped by cops-who threatened to shoot him-claiming he was illegally carrying, to which the victim responded that it was legal as he had the required license. he was held, and blasted with expletive-filled verbal attacks by the cops before they released him when the supervisors eventually figured out the law. Now, after he posted a recording on the internet of the incident, they decided to charge him with disorderly conduct.

This country has become a police state. It is inevitable that every government will devolve into tyranny, for government by its nature is the creation of a means of controlling one group of people by another, and yet this is blatant enslavement of the people by the government.