In July 1992, I went to Alaska to pan for gold, and to live out the happy story, I don’t mind admitting, of the American who finds something fundamentally valuable and untouched in earth no person has ever walked on. My first day in Anchorage I made the acquaintance of two men who fascinated me. John lived off the land and well off the grid and on, as he put it, “the cutting edge of freedom” in the hills outside Talkeetna; had built his own cabin, acted as midwife at the births of his four children. His friend Richard prospected in the Bonanza Hills southwest of Anchorage and hunted bears with a compound bow. They’d set up a kind of headquarters in a booth at the Arctic Burger, a coffee shop frequented by Alaska oldtimers—they still call it “the Roadrunner” though copyright laws forced a renaming years ago. Openhanded, cheerful men—winning to talk to—these two had come into the city that summer to stump for presidential canditate and ex–Green-Beret-hero Col. Bo Gritz. Not that they cared much for politicians or harbored any great hopes for government. Richard himself refused to pay taxes on his income. The IRS was after him for over a hundred thousand dollars, but he denied them any claim to legal authority, as the sixteenth Amendment had never been properly ratified. “The whole thing’s a bluff,” he said. He’d gone so far as to have himself deleted, somehow, from the Social Security system—his Alaska driver’s license showed, where the familiar number should be, nine big zeroes all in a row.
“Bo Gritz is a true leader,” Richard said. “He gave a speech in Colorado and eight thousand men in the audience pledged they’d follow him into battle if it came down to that. That’s eight battalions,” he pointed out.
And it was time to talk of battalions. Forty-three concentration camps had been built around the country. Under U.N. auspices, foreign troops conducted exercises on our soil; others, whole divisions, waited on the Baja peninsula. Both men believed that somebody had shanghaied the United States, that pirates had seized the helm of the ship of state and now steered it toward some completely foreign berth where it could be plundered at leisure. One of Bo Gritz’s military contacts, they said, had verified all this. “The word’s gone out, the order’s come down: 1992 will see the last presidential election.”
My wife and I honeymooned that month, just us two, at Richard’s mining operation in the Bonanza Hills. A plane dropped us off, and a plane would pick us up nine days later. Meanwhile Cindy and I lived without any contact with what I had up to then believed to be the world, in a place without human community, authority, or law, seventy miles from the nearest person. We brought a shotgun with us—I’d never before owned a gun, somebody else always handled that stuff in what I’d thought of as the world—and I was surprised to discover that keeping it ready and handy instantly asserted itself as the bedrock requirement of our lives. And other things I’d never thought about became uppermost, matches and tools and, above all, clarity of thought and our ability to improvise—we had to stay focused in our senses, ever mindful of our tasks, because what we’d brought, and who we were, was all we had. At last whatever happened to us could only be our fault or bad fortune, and fixing it our responsibility. We realized our lives had never before been our own—our lives.
I had always lived under the protection of what I’ve since heard called “the Nanny State”: Big Mom, ready to patch me up, bail me out, calm me down, and only a three-digit phone call away.
Just the same, it’s a free country. I’d always taken for granted that the government looked after the basics and left me free to enjoy my liberty. Now I wasn’t so sure. This little taste of real autonomy excited in me a craving for it. Maybe I wanted freedom from the government’s care and protection. Maybe I wanted freedom from any government at all. I felt grateful for people like Richard, who’d run away from home and could get along for weeks at a time in places like the Bonanza Hills.
In the immense solitude of the Bonanza Hills somebody had been reading. In the prospector’s cabin we found a few books: None Dare Call It Conspiracy by Gary Allen and Larry Abraham, describing the gigantic fraud perpetrated by the nation’s Federal Reserve system. Racial Hybridity by Philip Jones, B.A. Also by the same author: The Negro: Serpent, Beast, and Devil—a stamp in the flap identified it as the property of the Aryan Nation Church in Hayden Lake, not sixty miles from our home in Idaho. We’d heard of them: eight guys in a rundown compound with a lot of wooden crosses and kerosene, taken seriously by nobody except those who were paid to do so, like the press and the FBI.
When we got back to Anchorage, Cindy and I attended the America First Party’s rally for Bo Gritz, a small affair, surely fewer than a hundred people under an awning hastily erected in a light Alaskan rain, city folks and country folks, but mostly country folks, of all ages but mostly middle-aged, eating moose and venison barbecued right there in the small downtown park. There was one black kid present about eighteen, laughing at the world and enjoying the food. Nobody bothered him. Bo Gritz showed up, ate some moose, and made a speech. A man of medium height, barrel-chested and blunt-faced, he looked less like my idea of a warrior than like someone who’d hire himself out to collect delinquent loans. One loan in particular concerned him: He promised, if elected, to instruct Congress to mint a single coin “of the basest, most worthless metal we can find,” to which he’d assign the value of one trillion dollars. “And I’ll toss it down at the feet of the bankers and say—there, pick it up. That’s the national debt. Paid in full.” The crowd, small as it was, managed to produce a roar. “It may seem our numbers are small. And they are,” he said. “But I’m not worried. Do you know why? Because I’ve read the book, and I know how it turns out.” And just as he said it, some in the audience nodded and said too: “We win.”
What book? The Bible’s Revelation? The Turner Diaries, in which provocateurs touch off a racial Armageddon? I didn’t ask. And what would we win?—an election, or a war? I didn’t ask.
The people I talked with seemed to imply that the greatest threat to liberty came from a conspiracy, or several overlapping conspiracies, well known to everybody but me. As a framework for thought, this has its advantages. It’s quicker to call a thing a crime and ask Who did it? than to call it a failure and set about answering the question What happened?
A year later, I’m traveling the Texas-Mexico border region in a rented car. The border patrol stops me well north of Big Bend National Park—sixty miles north of the border—and the officer asks me who I am and where I’m from and I tell him. “Can we have a look in your vehicle?” “What if I said no?” “Then we’d bring the dog over and he’d tell us we better search the vehicle.” “You mean he’d give you probable cause for a search?” “Just your refusal to let us search,” the officer says, “would be probable cause for a search.”
In the elections last November a number of Democrats ran unopposed in our county. Republicans held on to their offices, but gained none locally. Nearly one-fifth of the people here receive some kind of public assistance—twice the rate of the New York boroughs—and our main industry is heavily subsidized by the federal government. But this isn’t some hippie conclave next door to San Francisco. It’s Boundary County, Idaho’s northernmost district.
Perhaps above all our subsidized industry, logging—with access roads built free by the federal government and stands of timber in the national forest auctioned off to lumber corporations at a loss to the nation’s taxpayers—makes this region a resentful hot zone. We live in these hills, we see them covered with tens of thousands of square miles of a marketable, renewable crop, but the government insists on letting too many of these trees grow up, fall over dead, burn to ash, come to nothing. Resentment makes a blind spot when it comes to extremists—you hate the government? So do we, even if between the two hatreds lies a vast, mainly unexamined, difference.
Three years ago the Weaver family, who lived south of us on Ruby Ridge, ended an eighteen-month siege in a firefight with U.S. marshals. In the first exchange of shots, one of the marshals and one of the Weaver children died. Two hundred federal marshals and FBI agents descended on the town of Bonners Ferry. None of us knew where all these people had come from. They instituted a curfew and banned gatherings, ran up debts in the stores, surrounded the Weaver place, killed Mrs. Weaver while she stood in the doorway of her cabin with her infant daughter in her arms. Bo Gritz showed up and talked her husband Randy and her surviving children into surrendering. The federal agents left town. None of us knew where they’d gone.
Then, too, here live a few folks like me—a city boy grown too neurotic to abide urban life, a lover of the wilderness chiefly for its solitude, but certainly no country boy—surrounded by a forest that would quickly extinguish him were he ever to lose his way in it, working half the day at a computer console and then stepping out to stumble mystified among the greasy barely functioning accoutrements of rural living, snowplows and well pumps and chain saws and pickups, things the local ten-year-olds can take down into piles and reassemble blindfolded. I fish poorly. I’ve never hunted, mainly for fear I’ll shoot myself. And I like the trees, whether standing up or fallen over rotting. I don’t like seeing clear-cuts like great big vacant lots in the wilderness. Yet I’m one who’s lent sympathy to the militias, the throwback mountaineers, even the Christian Nazis. This is a free country. I just want to be left alone. I thought that’s all they wanted, too.
During the eighteen months that Randy Weaver lived under a kind of self-arrest thirty miles away, it regularly occurred to me that if I were a real journalist, I’d be visiting him often and getting the story on him and his family before whatever was going to happen finally happened. But he clearly valued his privacy; and I must not be a real journalist, because I felt compelled to value it, too. What did they want? I didn’t ask.
In the sixties I was a pot-deranged beatnik who remained in college mainly to avoid Vietnam. I didn’t trust that particular government, but I thought that Washington could fix things if only we could take it over. Now I’m in the White House, or somebody a whole lot like me is.
At about three o’clock one morning in October 1994, while you and I were sleeping, Congress passed the Telephone Privacy Act requiring the phone companies to reengineer their equipment, and granting $300 million in federal funds to make the change, so that every phone in the United States of America can be tapped by federal agents from their offices.
At breakfast one morning, also that October, my family and I read the weekly paper together, captivated by its account of the recent sweep-search of the Sandpoint Middle School. Cops and dogs had locked the children down for three hours while they combed through lockers and belongings. They found a pistol and a bag of marijuana, not a big haul, but the principal was satisfied that he’d managed to “send a message.” Indeed he had. My kids attended Mt. Hall Elementary about sixty miles north, and they heard it all the way up here. A couple of questions: What language is that, exactly? And one my son Daniel asked: “How come they didn’t just use the intercom?” The response of North Idaho parents to this message was overwhelmingly favorable.
From Section 90107 of the Omnibus Crime Bill: “The President may declare a State or part of a State to be a violent crime or drug emergency area and may take appropriate actions authorized by this section.” Such actions include sending in federalized National Guard, and “any Federal agency.” Section 180102 authorizes Multi-Jurisdictional Task Forces to be funded with “assets seized as a result of investigations” to be used “to enhance the operations of the task force and its participating State and local law-enforcement agencies.”
Ryan runs the surplus store down the road, the kind of surplus store that lives up to all the expectations about North Idaho, dealing in, along with the usual outdoor gear, gas masks, semiautomatic rifles, concealable weapons, literature like The Anarchist’s Cookbook. I bought all four volumes of The Poor Man’s James Bond there and that’s all any writer would ever need in the way of reference material on murder, terror, or guerrilla war. I like Ryan. He’s a student of the U.S. Constitution, and he keeps a stack of Informed Jury pamphlets on the counter right at the point-of-purchase. Often we talk politics, and we find a lot to agree about—he’s become as suspicious of the State as I have. But when I suggested that maybe he’d like to check out the Libertarian Party, he was shocked at the libertarian notion that each person should be allowed to pursue happiness in his or her own way, even homosexuals. “But you could have a township that banned gays, as long as people weren’t forced to live there, and as long as you didn’t go over and bomb the gay township,” I pointed out. “Listen: Do you know what they do to each other?” Ryan asked me. “We would go over and bomb them.”
What about that college beatnik—was he in the government’s sights? I wrote away to the FBI for my records a couple of years back. Three months later I got four pages headed Student for a Democratic Society. Here and there on these pages can be found bits and pieces, mainly about a demonstration I attended in 1967, at which I was arrested. But for the most part, the paragraphs have been blacked out with a felt-tip pen, and I have no idea what they say.
I’m standing by our mailbox on a two-mile straightaway on Meadow Creek Road between the Purcell Mountains and Deer Ridge, one of my favorites places on earth. In this alpine region the valley’s bed is the largest open space I can stand in, four square miles occupied by our family and five others. In the mailbox today I find an envelope bearing no return address, and in the envelope two legal-size typesheets crammed with a six-thousand word tract entitled “BLUEPRINT FOR The FINAL TAKEOVER OF THE USA By 2 ALIEN Jews, Donald Goldberg and Indy Badh-WAR.” It describes how the president starts a phony war and then uses demonstrations against this war as an excuse to suspend civil liberties. “Secret, elaborate plans for martial law and for directing military WITHIN OUR BORDERS IS already drawn up/distributed…”
About once a week I play cards at the Club Bar just across the state line in Troy, Montana. The Club is profoundly Montanan, a patchwork homemade-feeling saloon with a barrel stove and a fight every night and dogs and orphans wandering in and out, and a plywood coffin propped up in a corner. The bar itself is no great shakes. They used to have an impressive one, but in the sixties a powder-monkey for the Highway Department came in during his lunch hour wired with dynamite and ordered everybody out, then blew himself up, and the bar too. The establishment’s owner, Tony Brown, explains that the coffin is for “the next guy who dies in here.”
In the eighties, Tony served as the mayor of Troy, and perhaps by reason of this former prominence the Militia of Montana approached him almost two years ago. In a series of private meetings “right here at this table,” he says, slapping the poker table, a group of three men assured him that they intended to protect the rights of citizens and discriminate against none. Tony Brown agreed to book the local high school’s auditorium for a meeting of the Militia of Montana.
In the meantime, he read the militia’s literature, and he had some questions. “Do you mean to tell me,” he asked them, “that if a little faggot boy wanted to lead the charge, like blowing on the trumpet, you wouldn’t let him in your militia?” John Trochman, head of the militia, told him no—“Not unless he converted to our religion.”
Tony Brown makes his way across the small west end of Troy, Montana, a town with no section on the other side of the tracks—all of Troy is on the other side of the tracks. Tony Brown makes his way to the high school, to the militia meeting, where he’s agreed to serve as MC. He cuts through a neighbor’s backyard, gets hold of one of the neighbor’s hens, and plucks from its back one feather.
Interested citizens, mostly men, have filled the auditorium. At this time resentment against the national government runs high in Troy—the U.S. Forest Service has just floated a list of proposed regulations that make it hard to imagine any human could set foot in the federal forests without transgressing them, and it’s rumored also that 30,000 rounds of ammunition have been issued to the officers in anticipation of having to enforce the new rules. Better than two hundred angry Trojans have come to hear what the Militia of Montana has to say about all this.
Tony Brown, holding a chicken feather in his left hand, places his right one over his heart and leads the gathering in the Pledge of Allegiance. He reads Articles I and II of the U.S. Constitution, and the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution of the State of Montana, and then, by way of introducing Mr. Trochman, he reads a nine-page speech lamenting that “the current state of America is truly alarming to any man who is capable of reflection,” a speech all about Thomas Paine and the Founding Fathers and the Kennedy assassination and the Warren Commission and the forest service and taxation without representation, and about the night in 1773 when American colonists stuck feathers in their hats and dumped out tea in Boston Harbor.
Brown finishes his speech by refusing to endorse the Militia of Montana, and then sticks his feather in his hair and walks out of the meeting, out of the building, back to the Club. Back to the poker game.
“I was the first one to tell those assholes they were assholes,” Brown likes to say these days. “But I want it understood—all these extra laws, extra police, extra oppression: I just don’t think that’s the way to go.”
As I watched the TV coverage of the Waco tragedy in 1993, I kept in mind that the trouble there began over the nature of the firearms the Branch Davidians had stockpiled for themselves, over the question whether their weapons were military but legal, or too military and forbidden. It occurred to me that the attempt to abridge or deny what people see as a basic human right can result in more misery and carnage even than the people’s abuse of that right. I began to feel personally involved in the question. I don’t want to see whole families killed in order to protect me from the threat of random violence.
The government’s vigilance led it to pass in 1992—by no means an unusual legislative year—1,397 new federal laws and to generate 62,928 pages of regulations protecting me from, among other things, the possibility that I might make a bad deal on a nectarine. Have I checked my nectarines lately? The bureaus employed 125,666 people to write these regulations, return them to Congress, and wait for a response. After sixty days a regulation becomes law.
It is illegal to sell a peach smaller than two and three-eighth inches in diameter. Nectarines are covered, too. But nectarines have no fuzz, and are therefore legal down to a diameter of two and five-sixteenth inches.
But if freedom means self-responsibility—what about the people who can’t take care of themselves? My friend, I’m one of those people. Every day I don’t bring down something fatal on my head is another miracle. And every day I experience such a miracle, I want another one. Leave me alone. I’m in love with these miracles.
Last summer our family took a cabin in the Canadian Yukon, forty miles from the nearest neighbor. I wanted to live again for a while out from under authority. But the local conservation officer came around regularly just to visit—there wasn’t anybody but us to talk to—and also one day an immigration officer showed up and interviewed me and wrote things down about me on a pad. I started to wish we’d gone back to Alaska instead.
The life was basic—wood, food, water, weather. I read books about the U.S. Constitution and the Founding Fathers. At night we listened to the shortwave—the VOA, the BBC, Monitor Radio, and also a couple of Christian Right stations whose constituents had obviously become embroiled in the whole question of what the U.S. government thinks it’s doing. Looking in my books, reading of the great people and tremendous ideas that had once found a home on this continent and produced the U.S.A., I wondered, too, about the revisions we’ve since allowed. This isn’t the United States I was taught about in school, and it’s not the one the Founding Fathers founded. Meanwhile I listened to Linda Thompson, a fiery critic of everything governmental, babbling on WHRI’s For the People about bringing down U.S. choppers with .308s, and the more modulated voice of the show’s host in response, both voices mourning the death of something even more precious than human life, and above all crying out, of Ruby Ridge, of Waco: What happened?
The lamentation stirred my heart. The incomprehensible actions of federal agents at Ruby Ridge and Waco had taught me that people willing to make a stand for their rights, run the risk of martyrdom. Always and everywhere that’s been the story. But my life long I’d believed the promise that here in America we tell a different story, of a nation created by and for those very people, and no home for bullies and tyrants. A government made, in the words of its first Declaration, “to secure those rights.” Not to grant them, not to ration, license, or prioritize among them. To secure them.
My own unexamined assumption had been that the world’s gotten so much more dangerous since the late eighteenth century that only a fool would expect George Washington or James Madison to stand by the original Bill of Rights today.
But I’d forgotten that when they gathered to frame the Constitution they did so in a country full of Tory infidels, just after a revolution, on a continent where several powers vied for rich territory, in a world full of terrorists and saboteurs, in a nation very, very wobbly on its legs. Yet they counted the security of this infant nation less important than the freedom of its citizens—and so they honored the rights of those citizens to speak and think and worship and freely trade, and the right to keep weapons as sophisticated as anything the military could acquire for itself, even to the point of buying a cannon and positioning it on one’s front lawn right downtown.
What happened? If I ask the government, if I ask my leaders, they’ll say nothing happened. This is still a free country. If I ask the stations broadcasting in the upper bands, the voices from Nashville and New Orleans and Noblesville, Indiana, fading in and out in the ether, they have an answer, but it’s an answer to a different question, and it goes like this:
God made the world in eight, not seven, days. Two branches of humanity were fashioned, from one of which descended the Twelve Tribes of Israel; the others, the darker races, God created on a different day. Early in history Sephardic people came down from the north into the Middle East and supplanted the original Jews, drove out the Chosen People, and for centuries these quislings have conspired to rule the earth through the institutions of finance. The true Chosen of God, the descendents from the original Twelve Tribes, are the white race.
Just before the Great Depression the U.S. federal government and the nation’s economy itself were hijacked by the Jewish families who run the banks of the Federal Reserve. They seek to own everything and enslave everyone by extending their power over the earth through a one-world government to be developed out of the current United Nations. They foster high-level groups committed to this goal. Anyone who’s anyone in U.S. statesmanship, for instance, belongs to the Council on Foreign Relations, and some of them openly espouse the idea of a single world government, though that isn’t necessarily the council’s stated goal.
These people use the federal income tax, never legally instituted (the amendment fell one vote short of ratification, a fact afterward covered up) to rob us of our wealth. The Federal Reserve prints worthless money and lends it to the nation and gets it back as true value, backed by the good name of the United States, and gets it back with interest.
These ideas have been floating around since before the invention of the printing press. They found a new perch when the Federal Reserve and the League of Nations were formed. People saw them taking a solid shape in the policies of FDR’s New Deal, looming large when the U.N. came to be. Who did it? Behind it all, behind all of modern Western history, lurks the Master Conspirator Jew.
The young French nobleman Alexis de Tocqueville traveled the U.S. for nine months in 1831, and in his writings on young America he makes no mention of conspiracy. He found no Jewish plotters. No Secret Service, FBI, BATF. No FDR, no LBJ. Karl Marx, Father of the Communist Conspiracy, had written nothing yet. The Federal Reserve did not exist.
How did America’s future look to the Frenchman? “An innumerable multitude of men, all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives…. Above stands an immense power which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratification…. to keep them in perpetual childhood…. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules…men are seldom forced by it to act, but are constantly restrained from acting…a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd…”
Alexis de Tocqueville didn’t smell a conspiracy, just the natural course of politicking, what we now call “politics as usual,” candidates trying any way they can to attach themselves to emotional issues. What do you covet? What do you fear? We’ll fix it. Come election day even the national, federal leaders want to be part of my family, putting food on my table, money in my pocket, a zone of safety around my children. That’s why so many federal laws duplicate state laws already on the books—the feds want to help run my hometown. The New Republicans call it “micromanaging” a hi-tech phrase that itself just duplicates a couple of old sayings: “All politics is local.” Or “Everyone runs for sheriff.”
The U.S.A. was meant to be a collection of small governments kept from oppressing minorities and each other by one limited but overarching federal system of laws and courts. But people prefer to oppress each other, each one wants all the others regulated, and the Feds took a lesson from local politicians who used this basic desire to their advantage by promising to honor it in exchange for votes.
I want to float above the fray, want to be like Walt Whitman, “both in and out of the game, and watching and wondering at it.” But when the violence starts, I’m not aloof. I’m in the middle, pulled both ways. When the violence starts, the one in the middle, if he’s honest with himself, must feel the guilt for the excesses of both sides.
When I heard about the bombing in Oklahoma City, I felt sick to my soul…My God, what have I done?
I believe the State should be resisted wherever it encroaches. But the bombers of that building will demonstrate for us something we don’t want demonstrated: There’s no trick to starting a revolution. Simply open fire on the State; the State will oblige by firing back. What’s harder is to win a revolution, and the only victory worthy of the name will be a peaceable one.
Why should I be talking about resisting government? Take it all around, we Americans are the freest people on the planet. Our riches afford us mobility, variety, and opportunity enough to drive us crazy, as well as the time to go crazy in—more and more of all of these as time goes on. Like other systems descended from English law, ours offers certain protections from government intrusion—fewer and fewer of these as history marches forward.
If I’m not on either side when the shooting starts, and I don’t like being in the middle, then where do I belong?
I’m one among many, part of a disparate—sometimes better spelled “desperate”—people, self-centered, shortsighted, stubborn, sentimental, richer than anybody’s ever been, trying to get along in the most cataclysmic century in human history. Many of us are troubled that somewhere, somehow, the system meant to keep us free has experienced a failure. A few believe that someone has committed the crime of sabotaging everything.
Failures need correction. Crimes cry out for punishment. Some ask: How do we fix it? Others: Who do we kill?
My family flew back from the Yukon in a plane. I drove home in the pickup across a thousand miles of North American wilderness, sleeping beside streams and moving at my own pace and answering to no one.
Some miles north of Smithers, British Columbia, one of the tires went flat. I kept two spares aboard, but the jack, it turned out, wasn’t working, and so I stuck out my thumb in hope of a lift into Smithers. A pickup with Alaska plates stopped a quarter mile up the road, and I ran up there and explained the problem to my rescuers, two young men hauling a big stock-trailer overflowing with antlers and a self-possessed, unperturbable dog of the sledding type who sat between them in the front seat. “We’ve got a jack,” the driver said, and began backing his rig up along the shoulder toward mine, slowly and expertly—he didn’t stick his head out the window, but only eyed the jutting side mirrors.
These two, I saw when they got out to put a jack to my bumper, were country boys from quite another era, guys in overalls and big shoes and blackened jeans and red suspenders, with boyish, wispy beards, like ghosts from the War between the States. The driver was thick and blond and as becalmed as his dog, only more of a golden Labrador, the other man much like a retriever too, the thin-nish intelligent kind, and both of them with the true clear gaze of dogs.
“Lot of antlers,” I said. They had hundreds piled in the trailer, to the roof. They told me they made furniture out of antlers and drove around anywhere and everywhere, selling it. For the past month I’d been reading about the old days, missing them as if I’d lived in them, and I said, “You sound like free Americans.”
“No,” the smaller man said, and thereafter did all the talking while the other, the blond driver, changed my tire. “No American is free today.”
“Okay, I guess you’re right. But what do we do about that?”
“We fight till we are,” he said. “Till we’re free or we’re dead, one or the other.”
“Who’s going to do this fighting?”
“A whole lot of men. More than you’d imagine. We’ll fight till we’re dead or we’re free.”
Ghosts indeed. Rebel ghosts wending through the Appalachians to enlist in time for Gettysburg.
“Listen: I’m asking: Just tell me: What do you want?”
“Freedom. We just want freedom.”
“But I mean—what happens if you bring down the government? What do you want to replace it with?”
“We’ll need strong men, strong leaders. I believe the time will provide them,” he said.
“And is that the only way to get it? In a war?”
The young man was chewing tobacco. He had big, kind eyes and his lips worked around his chew. I feel it worth mentioning that he didn’t spit in my presence. He said, “Freedom has to be bought with blood.”
In that landscape of mountains and empty distances, the statement resonated with profound authority. Blood sacrifice—it’s as old as human spirituality itself, it’s the thread that binds the Old Testament to the New, that binds in faith the Christian people to the God who bought their freedom from sin with the blood of his only son. But hasn’t the price been paid, according to the Bible? Or does it seem we’ve been abandoned here unredeemed, confused, trying to decipher a strange new text?—a Third Testament cobbled together out of bits and pieces of the other two and interpretations that don’t bear much examination. Prophesies of blood sacrifice and a war between good and evil, prophecies not yet fulfilled.