Once, They Feared Us

Leaders, I write this not as a plea nor a threat but as a record of memories lived.
History is not kind to those who forget its lessons, and one lesson in particular has been buried under layers of marble and bureaucracy: once upon a time, rulers feared the ruled. Since people forgot this you all have been unkind to them.

Let me remind you all. Let’s start here.

The year was 1765. Across the Atlantic, the King put his seal on an act that demanded obedience from men he would never meet. The Stamp Act decreed that every contract, every newspaper, every legal scrap of paper bore a tax. A distant order, signed in wax, carried across the sea by agents of the Crown was a kindness to those around the crown. Those the King interacted with who were always of the most pressing concern.

Now a law is nothing until a man enforces it. And the men who enforced this one were not kings. They were everyone’s neighbors. They lived in the towns they taxed. They prayed in the same churches, ate at the same restaurants, and walked down the same streets as everyone else. Their proximity was their undoing. And a fundamental part of the Nation to come.

When neighbors who believed the tax collectors had betrayed them, they did not wait for an election two years away. They did not write petitions into the void of Parliament. They met them face-to-face. They stripped them bare, smeared them with tar that burned their flesh, rolled them in feathers, and dragged them through the streets. Their dignity was taken, their authority mocked, their power inverted before the eyes of those they once presumed to rule. They did this as much as a warning to others as much as in retribution.

I do not tell you this to glorify violence. I tell you because it is evidence. Evidence that accountability once lived close to the governed. In Old America, leaders did not rule from a distance. They walked among the people they taxed, judged, and disciplined. And for that reason, they carried a healthy fear: the fear of their neighbors that kept them accountable to those people. At this time politicians and those representing unreasonable authority and influence over people’s lives began to be taught the more they F@#$ed around the More they would find out.

This was Old America’s deal. It was not gentle. It was not polished. But it was honest. A man could not betray his community and expect to hide behind a distant capital. If a bridge collapsed, the builder bore the shame. If a preacher abused his flock, he faced them the next morning. If a politician plundered, he had to stand in the marketplace with those he cheated. Accountability was not an abstract word. It was a presence in every meal, every handshake, every church, and throughout every family.

Medicine was part of this deal. It was not rationed by decree. Families healed themselves with the knowledge of their elders, with gardens planted outside their doors, with roots and herbs passed down through memory. If a healer cured, he was trusted. If he poisoned, he was shamed, beaten, or killed. The responsibility was direct, the consequence undeniable.

Again I am not trying to inspire violence. This is a call to those who have it in their heart. We were once a violent people but we evolved as a people into a system of divided responsibility,  promised collective security & prosperity by way of  prohibition’s prescription system the government’s education system that socializes them us all from 5 years old to 18. (Mandatory)

The game they built is designed to justify itself on those who would lash out. If you resort to violence they win. They built everything around the expectation that you all will rise up individually in very violent ways. They shake people up like a coke and pop their top. It’s up to you to be able to control yourself to the point you don’t explode.

So back to the story. That is how Old Deal America was. Even before we claimed our independence it’sjust how people in this land have beensince they got here. In their America power and consequence walked the same road. Where leaders looked into the eyes of those they governed, not through the glass of cameras or the shields of guards. It was not utopia. It was often brutal. But it was accountability at throughout our Unions history extending far before it’s founding.

The America you live in is not that America. It’s not even the America you were born into. The America we live in was created on 9-11 when massive change started happening in real time on live tv almost daily.

The Line in the Soil

The America you have today is the America of distance where we’ve literally been separated by six feet and from gathering in more than the smallest groups. It’s part of our history. Between the people telling us how we can live lies a fortress built of marble, law, and immunity. The line that separates the two is not a date on a calendar, but a deal that was struck.

Old America’s deal was simple:

I will take care of me for you. You take care of you for me.

You may govern, but you will be held to account by those you govern.

The New Deal America you now preside over is different:

You may govern, and you will be held to account by no one, for you govern in the name of all.

That is the line in the soil.

The Old Deal made responsibility a neighborly affair. The builder, the preacher, the politician — each bore the weight of their decisions because they had to face those they harmed. Power lived close to consequence.

The New Deal reversed this. It arose in crisis through economic collapse, then justified in war, and forgotten in the upheaval.

To manage a nation out of food, work, Money, power was centralized. Agencies multiplied. Responsibility was dispersed so widely it became untraceable. The individual lawmaker, regulator, or judge was no longer personally accountable. Each could point to the machinery around them, and the machinery itself could point to no one.

Consider the structure:

A lawmaker drafts a bill that outlaws a medicine. He is immune.

A regulator enforces the rule, denying treatment. She is immune.

A judge upholds the denial. He is immune.

A doctor follows the directive, watching his patient decline. He is immune.

At each step, the suffering is real. At each step, the responsibility vanishes. No man faces the square. No woman meets the eyes of the family harmed. Responsibility has been dissolved into what is called “Public health.”

This is not a flaw in the system but rather by design. The New Deal created a governing philosophy: that the state itself is the guardian of prosperity and health. To make that work, it had to free itself from personal consequence. Immunity was not an afterthought; it was the foundation. If there was a problem between the people and their government the problem was the people. The government was divine and above reproach.

And prohibition’s prescription system and our public education system became both the carrot and the stick. The proving ground that bore an untouchable foundation.

Prohibition’s Prescription

The line between Old Deal America and New Deal America was drawn not only in marble and immunity, but in prohibition.

It began with alcohol. The Eighteenth Amendment was sold as a crusade for health and morality. Instead, it delivered poison. Bootleggers filled the demand, and desperate men drank spirits cut with wood alcohol, methanol, and lye. Blindness spread. Families buried their dead. Yet who among the lawmakers bore the shame? None. The responsibility that would once have fallen on the neighbor now dissolved into air and politicians and those willing to break the law prospered.

When Prohibition was repealed, the lesson was not abandoned. It was perfected. The state had discovered a method by which it could criminalize the very act of seeking medicine, and yet be shielded from the consequences of the suffering that followed. All it had to do was declare the prohibition in the name of the “public good,” and accountability vanished. In it’s wake was left the prescription system and government control of our medicine.

Thus came the next wave. The Controlled Substances Act of 1970 gathered plants, powders, and compounds into schedules of forbidden medicine. Morphine, laudanum, and poppy tea… remedies known for centuries… were declared illicit. Healing knowledge, once passed from grandmother to granddaughter, from healer to family, was now a crime. Entire acres of land became life sentences overnight with the stroke of a pen.

But again: who bore responsibility for the agony that followed? Not the lawmakers who voted. Not the agencies that enforced. Not the judges who upheld. The fortress absorbed it all. Patients turned to the street. Families lost fathers and mothers to prison. Veterans returned from war only to find the medicine they had relied on in battle was now contraband. Yet no politician answered for it.

You, leaders of today, inherit this design. Prohibition is not an accident of policy. It is the architecture itself. Without it, the fortress would crumble, for prohibition is the cornerstone on which all immunity rests.

Who would have thought the right side of history would be the wrong side of the law…

The Cost

The War on Drugs is the war for drug control… it does not bleed, but the people do. Its walls absorb blame, but not pain. And while those who govern may walk untouched, the governed carry scars that will never heal.

The patient in agony denied by his doctor, who fears government agencies more than his oath.
The veteran who once carried morphine on the battlefield, now driven to drink himself to death at home.
The family torn apart by a prison sentence for possession.
The town hollowed out by incarceration, untreated pain, and despair.

These are not statistics. They are the ledger of prohibition written across flesh and soil.

Not one lawmaker has faced a jury for the deaths his laws caused. Not one regulator has stood before the families her enforcement destroyed. Not one judge has buried the bodies his rulings condemned. The fortress governs without consequence, while the people bleed without recourse.

In Old America, harm found its author. In New Deal America, harm is something the most emotionally, intellectually,  socially,  and spiritually abused turn to when they eventually lash out.

The Fool’s Errand of Reform

The governing system is not only strong; it is designed to be unassailable. Many who suffer within its shadow believe the answer is to repair it from the inside. They march, they petition, they vote. They imagine that if the right law is written, if the right reform is passed, then accountability will return. When they realize that’s untrue some snap.

But this is a fool’s errand.

Every reform is written in the same ink of immunity. When it fails… and it always fails… responsibility dissolves again. Repeal does not dismantle. It repurposes. Each “fix” only adds layers of flesh to an already obese government.

Prohibition is not a mistake awaiting correction. It is the system’s operating principle. To outlaw medicine is not an error but a function. To dissolve responsibility is not a failure but a design.

Thus, those who fight to change the law are, unknowingly, reinforcing the system they despise. The answer cannot be sought throughthe law. Through the system. It must be sought beyond it.

The Inward Revolution

If the system cannot be controlled, then what remains? The answer is older than law: knowledge.

Families once passed down remedies as surely as they passed down land. Women taught daughters which roots eased childbirth. Elders taught sons which leaves soothed fever. Healers preserved prayers and practices that reached back centuries. Medicine was not given by permission. It was learned and passed on out of love and duty.

Our government has tried to outlaw this memory, but it cannot erase what is remembered or forbid what is relearned. A man who knows how to make his medicine is beyond the reach of prohibition. A woman who carries in her memory the cure for pain cannot be forced to beg for it.

This is not rebellion. It is sovereignty. It is independence.

I myself abstain. I choose to go without. But my abstention matters only because I could choose otherwise. Abstention without knowledge is starvation, not sovereignty.

This is the inward revolution: not mobs in the street, not petitions on desks, but memory rekindled in homes and gardens. The quiet return of medicine to the hands of the people. The recognition that the body belongs to the one who bears it, not to the government.

You fear no longer, and perhaps rightly so. But you should recognize a deeper truth: a sovereign people need not riot. They need only remember.

A Word to Leaders

Leaders, this is not a manifesto against you. It is not a call for violence, nor a plea for mercy. It is a record of truth.

The fortress you inherit is not one you built alone. It was raised over generations, justified in the name of the public’s health and prosperity. Its genius is its shield: it dissolves responsibility so completely that no one ever bears the weight of harm.

But know this: people are beginning to see through it. They may not say it in speeches. They may not write it in petitions. But they feel it in their bones as real as arthritis. They know accountability has been severed from power. They know that to beg for medicine through the law is to ask for water in a desert designed to remain dry andpunish the thirsty.

This is why they turn inward away from you. Not because they despise you, but because they cannot survive without doing so.

Once, leaders feared the mob in the square. Today, the mob is gone. But a quieter force is rising, one that cannot be tarred, feathered, or imprisoned: knowledge.

This is the reckoning you face. Not torches at your gates, but a citizenry that knows too much to be starved to be held down.