A loooong time ago the pseudonymous Jefferson Mack (a person so secretive about his identity that even though he (or she?) knew me, I never knew him (or her?)) wrote a book for Paladin Press called The Secret Freedom Fighter.
I found a chapter of it online last night and thought it might make a nice bit of inspiration in these dark times. The person who posted it headed it “A Good Citizen in a Bad Country.”
The examples are dated now. The book was written when there was no Internet. And even the cynical Mack now seems sweetly trusting about the Constitution and the ideals of democracy. But the spirit of the bad citizen (or better yet, the more conscious, deliberate Freedom Outlaw) is alive and well.
A smart bad citizen won’t let himself get caught being bad. He won’t brag to his friends and neighbors about what a bad citizen he is. He won’t tell the local commissar how proud he is of being a bad citizen. He won’t even tell his kids he enjoys being a bad citizen. He wants it kept a secret.
In a free democratic society, we don’t have much use for bad citizens. They endanger Our highways, litter our public parks, embarrass our womenfolk, and make us mad. A free society is supposed to be made up of good citizens who take their share of the burdens of taxes and social duties and get their share of the benefits of living free.
That’s a true free and democratic society, the kind the people who wrote our constitution wanted to give us. In every other kind of society, good citizens are suckers. They never get back what they put into it. So, if the government is interfering with your freedom to do whatever you want to do with your time and money, don’t be a sucker. Learn to be a bad citizen.
The more bad citizens there are, the harder it is going to be for the people who stole freedom to stay in power. The tyrant’s problem is that he is always outnumbered. He can get the guns and the thugs to use them. He can build concentration camps and forced labor camps. He’ll have spies and prison gulags. But he can’t put everybody in jail. He has to have people to till the fields, drive the trucks, work in the factories, and staff his bureaucracy.
So he has got to convince most of the people that life isn’t all that bad and that there is hope of a better future.
Jefferson Mack — whoever and wherever you are, I salute you!
