Sovereign Citizens

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under man …

Wait … what?

Did you catch it?  If you grew up in the USA reciting the pledge of allegiance every morning in school I bet you did and even if you didn't grow up here, there's a good chance you still caught it.  I was part-way through the third grade when the announcement was made that the words to the pledge of allegiance had been changed.  Now, you're probably seconds away from running to Google because surely the words were never officially changed to say, 'one nation under man' and let me spare you the trouble – you're right, they weren't.  Perhaps I should back up a bit.

The year was 1991 and it seemed like the country had just started taking offense to anything even remotely related to or involving God or religion in general.  You might think that particular offense is more recent than that but it actually started long before it ever went mainstream as it has lately.  In fact, the first rejection of the use of the word God in any official capacity began shortly after the words 'under God' were first added to the pledge of allegiance in 1954.  If you thought they were always part of the pledge, feel free to Google it in a new tab, I'll wait.  Just three years later, in 1957, a lawsuit was filed over the two-word addition and made its way all the way to the supreme court, and the resistance to a marriage of church and state has continued ever since, growing gradually larger with each generation of Americans.

By 1991 there were petitions to have the ten commandments removed from court rooms, the words 'In God We Trust' removed from official forms of currency, and a whole plethora of other very public outcries, but as a mere 8-9-year-old I was oblivious to all of this.  As far as I knew, God had always been part of the pledge and the money and always would be.  It never even occurred to me that things should be any other way, let alone that there were people in the country who felt differently about it.
I bounced into my classroom as I would have done on any other day, hung my book bag on one of the pegs at the back of the classroom and took a seat at my desk.  I loved school with voracious relish.  I didn't particularly care for Mrs. Sawyer, my third-grade teacher, and had preferred Mr. Leak from second grade far more, but I still loved learning and I loved homework, and I loved finishing my work packets and tests earlier than everyone else so that I could play The Oregon Trail on one of the two monochrome Apple II computers that we had in every classroom.  I loved climbing the monkey bars during recess or, even better, meeting up with big groups of my friends behind the library (a single wide trailer) where the teachers couldn't see us as we engaged in a good old-fashioned game of boys-v-girls, Gangs-of-New-York-style fist-to-cuffs.  I'd also been raised in a very patriotic household where nearly every male who was old enough had served the country in one branch of the military or another and had a deep love of and appreciation for Old Glory.  I'd been taught proper flag etiquette, how to hold a flag so that it doesn't touch the ground, how to fold it properly and count the folds, when to stand and place my hand over my heart, why not to salute it because I was a civilian, and – most importantly – I'd been taught what it stood for and what we honored when we honored the flag.  For these reasons, I loved reciting the pledge of allegiance and I think I must have felt a much keener sense of duty than most of my classmates as I remembered everything that I had been taught about standing up proud, looking directly at the flag, using my right hand and not my left, and stating each word clearly and with meaning.

It might seem like I'm just being prideful or boastful but the flag held a position of respect in our house that really wasn't as common, even then, as I had believed it to be.  When I was very little my parents took me with them to see the film Not Without My Daughter.  I was much too young to understand or even take interest in the movie's plot so I'm sure my mother had brought some other form of entertainment along for me such as my Game Boy or my Sega Handheld but there was a scene at the end where Sally Fields rounds a corner after having carried her daughter across the desert of utterly harrowing proportions and blowing gently in the breeze in front of her is the United States Flag.  A big giant flag on a big giant flagpole and while I'd not followed anything else about that movie, that scene had me dumbstruck and I cried because I realized that our flag and our nation symbolized something precious that not everyone in the world is fortunate enough to have.

Each morning at school the principal's voice would float over the classroom via the big boxy speaker hanging over the back door as she led us in the pledge and, even as a 9-year-old, I immediately felt a stirring in my chest alerting me that something was wrong when we heard her instructing us that we would be reciting the words 'under man' in place of 'under God'.  Mrs. Sawyer had even written the entire pledge on the blackboard so that we could read along and get it right.  I disobeyed.  I'd been raised in a very religious household and so I closed my eyes and did not read the words on the blackboard but recited it as I'd always known it.  A single little voice among 30 or more went utterly unnoticed and after the recitation was finished the speaker clicked to silence and class resumed as normal.  I told my parents about the change at the very first opportunity when I got home from school and their reactions had been precisely what I had expected from them.  Shock, horror, and anger.

I don't know how long it took for them to decide to remove me from public school after that but I know it wasn't long.  They'd already been toying with the idea for some time and that seems like it must have been the straw that broke the camel's back.  Prior to that event there had been a series of issues that had rubbed them the wrong way in our school district.  In first grade a boy had smacked me on the butt three times.  The first two times I'd politely asked him to stop but after the third time I'd knocked him down, sat on his chest and slapped the shit out of him with both hands until a teacher and two sixth-graders had been forced to literally pull me off of him.  I'd been marched to the principal’s office and my parents called in but no one had ever asked me why I'd done what I did until my father arrived, heard about the fight from the principal, and then looked right at me and said, "Why did you do that?".  When I revealed the events that had led up to my outburst, both the principal (a female) and my parents had been in agreement that a simple talking-to about how to appropriately address sexual harassment would suffice and no official disciplinary action was needed … at least, not for me.  I don't know if anything was done about the little boy.

In second grade my parents had been called to the principal because I'd grown bored with not getting any homework and had done over 100 pages in my math workbook one night after school.  To be fair, my teacher had told me to.  I'd been bugging him relentlessly about homework so he'd finally told me to take my math book home and do pages from it and I'd promptly asked to know how many pages he wanted me to do.  He'd fired back with some exorbitant number such as 140, fully believing that I probably wouldn't do any or that I would only manage to complete 2 or 3 but I had strong OCD tendencies even then so I'd taken my book home and done the precise number that he'd told me to do.  My parents had asked me several times that night 'Are you sure he said to do that many?' and I'd insisted that he had!  The next day the teacher was flabbergasted and didn't know what he was going to do with me for the better part of the year while the rest of my classmates did their hour of math every day, trying to catch up.  My parents had advised him to give me a book to read but it was clear to everyone, including the school officials, that school was holding me back.  By the time we were sent to Sylvan for testing after the accident I was doing 6th grade math, reading 12th grade books with above average comprehension, and spent more time playing The Oregon Trail than I did actually studying at school.

I wasn't alone in the drastic move to homeschooling.  My sister had been having disturbing experiences of her own in junior high school.  The school had just implemented a mandatory sexual education class with a textbook that advised masturbation as a cure for headaches and she was being threatened with a suspension after a group of girls had attacked her in a hallway between classes and tried to light her hair on fire over the brand of jeans she was wearing.  The rest of our siblings had already graduated so I suppose the idea of home schooling two young girls didn't seem unrealistic to my parents and they did alright with it at first.  My school actually supported the decision and provided textbooks, telling my parents to return them when I was finished with them and they would provide more for the next grade level.  We were expected to take our studies very seriously and follow a strict schedule just as we'd done at school which included an hour of PE first thing in the morning such as rollerblading or going for a bike ride with our mom, an hour of religious studies, and several hours of standard book learning including writing book reports, essays, and work packets.  We were even required to still do homework after school which we both thought was a bit unfair since all of our work had essentially become 'homework'.

I was sitting at our big family-sized dining room table – the same table I now have in my own home, as a matter of fact – working on a report about Joshua trees when my mother and one of my brothers came home looking positively disheveled and distraught cursing the entire city police department and legal system.  One of my brothers, I don't recall which, had gotten a traffic ticket for some minor infraction and my parents had gone down to the court house, along with my other brother, to try and get it dismissed.  My dad had done a fairly significant amount of legal research and felt that he had a strong case in their favor but the judge had quickly dismissed his every effort, showing - in my dad's opinion - a very clear bias and determination to rule against them regardless of any evidence they'd been prepared to present.  On the way out of the courtroom after court had been dismissed my dad had called it a "kangaroo court" in a comment to my oldest brother and the four had been, as they unanimously described it, assaulted by uniformed officers the instant they'd left the courtroom.  My oldest brother, the returned soldier, had been thrown against the wall and one arm pinned behind his back hard enough that he'd feared dislocation.  My father had been tackled onto a sofa and an officer had knelt with his full weight on his sternum causing a nasty softball-sized bruise that I later saw once he was released, and the other brother had been thrown into my mother with enough force to knock them both off their feet.  By the time the dust settled my father and oldest brother had been taken into custody and charged with contempt of court, while my mother and other brother had been sent on their way with a warning not to get involved.

Both men were held for three days before being released and I firmly believe that this was where their eventual hatred of authority had first been planted.  I think they'd believed in the legal system before that event; in its ability to act fairly and in the idea of being 'innocent until proven guilty'.  I also believe, however, that their distrust of the legal system began and ended with that particular city and district at that time.  I don't think either of them had had any cause, before that day, to assume that there was a rank injustice breeding among positions of powder beyond our city or county borders.  I believe we still saw most officers as the good Sherriff Andy Taylor – honest men who wanted to protect and serve their communities with common sense and good judgment.  Even then, it took several other run-ins with our local police before my dad decided that he wanted to get out of that city and move elsewhere.

He continued independent research into the theories, suspicions, and lesser-known facts of our governmental system that had first been introduced to him by the pamphlets that the younger of my big brothers brought home from the YFA groups with him.  He began speaking often and to anyone who would listen of The Straw Man Theory and the Redemption Movement and he eventually set in motion the procedures outlined in the Uniform Commercial Code to make both he and my mother Sovereign Citizens by literally and officially giving their social security numbers back to the IRS.  The process, even as I understand it now, is rather complex but the idea is this: your social security number is far more than a way to link you with a government aided retirement account, it makes you the literal human property of the United States Government – existing as a straw man (a fictitious version of you) against which the US government can obtain a loan using you as the collateral.  Essentially, if you are a law abiding, tax paying, US citizen then you are a slave living under the illusion of freedom and that illusion can be revoked at any time, for any reason, and without probable cause.

My sister and I were already sovereign at that time, though we didn't know it and it hadn't been an intentional move on my parent's part.  You see, in the modern world of today a newborn baby that is born on US soil is automatically assigned a social security number before it ever even leaves the hospital but that's not how things operated back in 1982 and before.  Back then it was the responsibility of the newly-minted parents to visit their local social security office with a copy of the newborn's birth certificate and apply for a number to be issued, and this was something that my parents had simply never done for us.  Their failure to get us 'numbers' had nothing to do with conspiracy theories or a belief in straw men – we just simply didn't need them as kids and I suppose they thought it was something that could wait until we were old enough to engage in things where one was required such as getting a job or taking out a loan for our first car.  Social security numbers weren't even required for school registration back then.

Here's a little-known fact that even most members of the Sovereign Movement don't know – when you complete the process of giving your social security number back to the government, the money that you've paid into the social security fund (or at least, a portion of it) must be returned to you.  It's part of the Uniform Commercial Code.  It's your money and it's viewed as a 'voluntary program' so if you opt-out, they can't keep it – at least, not all of it (though they do and will find a way to keep as much of it as they can).  When the check came for my mother's social security refund my dad took it down to the local copy shop and had it blown up to the size of a landscape painting which he proceeded to frame behind glass and hang proudly over the family's dining room table.  His own process for sovereignty encountered several complications for reasons that remain unclear to me to this day but I do know that it was never completed, his check was never received, and though he lived as a sovereign citizen for nearly half of his life, he never actually was one in the literal sense.

I don't know if there is any merit to the sovereign movement or if it's even worth doing.  I know it can be done, because I've witnessed it with my own eyes, but in the end the cost that we paid far outweighed any perceived benefit and I'm left wondering if the alleged 'loophole' of sovereignty isn't more of an intentional filter that was retained to identify and eliminate the misfits.  If you think I'm being a bit dramatic about that, consider other members and leaders of the sovereign movement that you know of - and if you don't think you know of any … prepare for goosebumps.

Though the media would never report it, a few well phrased Google searches will confirm that some of the most well-known members and proponents of the sovereign movement included David Koresh, the leader of the alleged cult known as the Branch Davidians who were massacred by the United States Government in Waco, TX; Randy Weaver of Ruby Ridge, Idaho, site of the 11-day siege and eventually victim of an unlawful police shooting that included his wife as she was holding their infant child as well as other members of their family; Justus Township of Jordan, Montana – better known as the leader of the Montana Freemen who had engaged in an 81 day standoff with authorities before eventually surrendering; and more recently Robert LaVoy Finnicum of the Bundy Ranch Standoff who was illegally shot and killed by officials in front of his wife and daughter while his hands were in the air in surrender in Oregon.

I know what you're probably thinking.  Those were all whack-jobs, crazy and dangerous fanatics and white supremacists who were only killed because they were criminals who refused to surrender peacefully.  I'll even admit that despite being raised in a house where the conspiracy theories around the first three of these examples were discussed vehemently, I had doubts of my own for many years.  I couldn't believe that our government in this great and beautiful nation would open fire on a building full of women and children from a helicopter, showering the tops of their heads with bullet holes.  I watched the news as a kid and even I thought these men seemed a bit crazy in the footage that was shown of them – but then similar things started happening to our family.  We were obviously never gunned down in a hail of bullet fire but when the local media reported that my dad was a 'white supremacist' I was absolutely enraged and shocked.  There was literally not a single shred of basis for the claim in anything that he'd ever said or done, or in any way related to his case and yet there the media was – telling the whole county that my dad was a skinhead or a Nazi and making him out to be a crazy and dangerous man when I very clearly and without a shadow of doubt in my mind or heart knew that he was neither of those things.  Because of my own experiences, all of which will be revealed in later posts, I now can't help but reflect back on those previous scars in American History and wonder how much of what we were told about those people was true and how much of it was blatantly fabricated for the sake of making a compelling case against them to deaden the outrage that might have otherwise been felt by the nation had we been permitted to believe that our government murdered innocent people who just wanted to be left alone to live a simpler life not unlike that enjoyed by many of the Amish groups that we've grown to accept.

I'm not going to try to convince you one way or another but I will call the events that I saw as I saw them and let you pass your own judgement on the people involved and even on me, personally.  I am prepared for that.  What I will not do is join the public narrative for the sake of popularity.  I will be telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth … so help me God.