[The Following Post is by TDV Corrrespondent Hans Wienhold]
I was always a damned radical…. now that I think of it. I just couldn't go with the flow.
For example….. I only ever remember hearing two kids around the age of 8 asking their parents, “What is this income tax you keep on talking about?”
I was the first one to ask.
My father explained it to me. In a nutshell, what he told me was that the more you make the more they take.
“That's wrong,” I said.
My dad, who had grown up and been educated in Nazi Germany, didn't bat an eye. He went on to explain that the reason for income tax was so that the government could build the roads and pay for schools. (The legitimacy of granting a road building and education monopoly to the government was not a question that had yet occurred to me.)
I can only imagine that at that age I found his answer sufficient because it seemed to work for me for the next ten plus years. (Of course, I wasn't paying any income tax at the time.)
The only other time I can recall an 8 or so year old kid asking the same question was when my younger sister did it. My dad gave her the same answer he gave me five years earlier.
Amazingly, her immediate response was, “That's wrong!”
In retrospect, the little story I have told you strikes me as being just a restatement of the message in the old “Emperor has no Clothes,” fable.
“Suddenly, a child in the crowd, too young to understand the desirability of keeping up the pretense, blurts out that the Emperor is wearing nothing at all.”
Going back to public school during the 1960s. Every year as Remembrance Day approached the teacher would give us a little tale about the meaning of it all. According to the teacher's version, the good guys (our side) died in the millions to preserve our freedom.
Well, I liked the sound of freedom. It always made sense to me in those days on some unarticulated level. Maybe I am just dreaming this all up but the next time I remember asking a question no one else seemed to be asking was in about the third or fourth grade during the approach of November 11th.
I put my hand up…. we had been trained to do that if we wanted to speak….. now that I think of it…. putting your hand up to speak was part of the training process… being conditioned to asking for permission from Gov. Inc. for just about anything you might want to do. These days, of course, there is almost nothing you can do without permission. Drive a car? Travel to another country? Work as a security guard or cab driver? Open up a store…. or even a lemonade stand…. heal the sick…. bury the dead.. have a pet, go fishing, smoke indoors, …. take a piss (!) …. just kidding… but we did have to ask permission to take a piss if we were in school, didn't we?
And of course, in most cases in the process of obtaining said permission there is a fee involved (nudge nudge, wink wink) … payable (of course!) …. to …. Gov. Inc. When I was in public school in Ontario in the 1960's there were two awards we could earn at the end of the school year. One was a Scholarship Award. The other was a Citizenship Award. I received a few Scholarship awards but I never got a single Citizenship award.
Looking back, I now know why I never received a citizenship award. I was always a bad cow. I refused to go along with the program. It's so easy to see some fifty years later.
I got the strap a lot.
I can't remember exactly how many times I got the strap but I think I got it in grades 2, 3, 4, 6 and 7. I got it once for reaching under the stall in the boys washroom and untying a friend's shoelace. Once I got it for shooting spitballs. Another time I got it for “not getting along” with a certain kid who no one else got along with.
In retrospect, I ask myself, “What was the real purpose or lesson I was, theoretically, being taught?” Was it because shooting spitballs was a hostile and dangerous act? Or was it because I just was not being a co-operative, cud chewing cow?
Alright…. I have veered way off course with whatever point i was trying to make….. except for this ….
During our policy driven November 11th explanations of why we should wear poppies and share a moment of silence for those who had paid the supreme price to preserve our wonderful freedoms I remember being the one who asked the teacher …. “Oh yeah? Well if this is a free country how come we have to be here in school?”
Whatever the answer the teacher gave…. I can't remember…. obviously didn't make much of an impression on me…. which is why I kept on getting the strap… and never won a citizenship award.
And sure enough …. to add insult to injury…. the “freedom loving” governments of today won't even allow surviving veterans of those great wars of “liberation” to smoke in their own legions and nursing homes.
They fought for freedom? Bahhh…… BULLSHIT!
The foregoing explains, in part, why I refuse to wear a poppy in November. The whole idea is a disgusting farce. Freedom had absolutely nothing to do with it.
“Oh yeah? Well if this is a free country how come we have to be here in school?”
SCHOOL SUCKS: The American Way
Hans Wienhold lives in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada and has held about 43 different jobs in his lifetime including construction, oil rigs, factories, security work, carpentry, laboratory and more but he has really always wanted to be a lumberjack. He currently drives a taxi which gives him lots of time to read the financial and freedom news and to rant about it. He contributes commentary as a Dollar Vigilante correspondent from time to time and writes regularly at his own blog at BlockRants.
