Soldiers Against the New World Order

"We got high and decided to go buy some Ak-47 ammo, which, at the time, seemed like the patriotic thing to do."

I have a life-long on-again off-again friend. When I was 24-25 years old he was my best friend and as 7 year olds at elementary school in rural Pennsylvania I, can say the same.  By the time we went to High School in the suburbs, we'd grown apart. Days after graduation I had left the scenic, sparsely populated river valley of my youth for military service. Four years later I came back to settle down, or so went the plan.

A few weeks after I left the Army and came home I remember driving down the local thoroughfare, a two lane road, and looking into my rear-view mirror to see the silhouette of a head in the car behind me. Through pane of mirror glass, my rear windshield, and his front windshield. No matter the fact that I hadn't spoke to him in at least 3 years, I could spot his head driving at 45 miles per hour through multiple bug-crusted glass of two aged Pontiac's, my Grand Am and his mom's Grand Prix. That's how familiar the guy's noggin was to me.

I saw him in the rear view, cracked a smile, and stuck my hand out the window motioning over my roof to the right shoulder of the road with pointed finger.

I pulled over carefully next to the abandoned post office, shut off my engine and exited the door. As I walked back I looked at his puzzled face, and upon getting it, he cracked a smile and jumped out the door as well. Next to the rocky cliffs, across from the rushing rapids of the river, two old friends approached one another.

"I thought I was about to get into a fight," he said as we met to shake hands. No worries, just thought I recognized the guy in the rear view. "I thought you were somebody I know but I couldn't think of who. How long are you in town?" For good now, I moved back down here. "How about that!"

How long do you talk to somebody on the side of a two lane highway? Not long, but you make arrangements to meet again, not on the shoulder of a road.

Steven worked for his father at a machine shop located off the side of that same road, albeit on the other side of the river and down a driveway that set the building between a creek and a steep embankment. Up the embankment and through the woods was his family's house and a field they'd hunt deer in each year.  The creek ran down to the river and we'd spent days as children fashioning small rafts to float frogs and crayfish down the waters. We'd surmise that within a day or so, they'd have floated to the Chesapeake Bay. Off to a world we couldn't imagine, those frogs.

Like most people I went to highschool with, I am somewhat reluctant to meet their acquaintance again. Too many awkward moments as we recap the times since and all I can think of are difficult military experiences matched up against their debauched college exploits. Steven didn't go to college as it turns out. He works with his hands, always had.

During one of our 'out' phases in middle school my mom told me we were doing to head over to Steve's house. She was friends with his mother and to her I was still a kid, and I, as a kid I was friends with Steve, therefore I still was.

But I haven't talked to Steve in like, a year. "Did you have an argument?" ... No."Then you can come with me I assume." I guess?

We entered the house and Carol, Steven's mom, said "Oh, he's in the basement." I thought it was funny that she also had no concept of the fact that we hadn't seen each other in a year.

I entered the basement and heard a machine coming from the carport. I walked that way and found Steven, at all of 14 years old, with a reciprocating saw and a series of cut-out diamond-board pieces. "Oh hey! Come and hold this for me," he said.  No matter to him how I got there after a year of him having his friends and me mine. He had acquired an alcohol fueled snow-mobile engine and was working to build a go-kart that could feature it.

Forward a decade from that night to about two years or so after we met again on the side of the road. His mechanical skills were as sharp as ever, although dulled to the monotony of day to day grind work at his father's old shop, which was now his.

As had become somewhat routine after I moved back to my hometown, I was driving home to my fathers house, where I lived for two semesters while I was on the GI-Bill and stopped as I was to pass Steve's shop. I sat at the counter by his cash register, a box of money with a calculator and notebook next to it. I lit up a cigarette and on this occasion, he dropped a bomb on me.

Up until this point we'd become friends again, heading out to bars and coming up just short of getting into fights with strangers. We brushed up on where we'd been for some time. Adventures, girls etc. It was fairly superficial until,

"Do you ever think about what you'd do if you had to leave it all behind and just take off into the woods?"

What are you kidding me?

"No, I'm serious.. I."

No, so am I, deadly 100 percent serious that I probably think about that like 9 times a week.

"I don't know sometimes man. I think maybe thinks are going to fall apart."

Well, I think about that too, the kind of 'Zombie Apocalypse" scenario, but even just like, hiking the Appalachian Trail, I think about that sometimes. I have some gear.

"I'm not talking about Zombies. I'm talking about Fema."

To put this into perspective, 2005 brought us Hurricane Katrina and between gun seizures and hard to believe stories of Police vs Citizen, which actually turned out to all be true, Steve wasn't the only guy with a little paranoia.

In 2009 when we are having this conversation in his shop, public trust is at an all time low nationally, but also locally. Covered somewhat prominently in national news and eventually turning into low hanging fruit for Michael Moore's documentary "Capitalism: A Love Story", Kids for Cash, as it was called, involved crooked judges in our area sentencing as many kids as they could to as much juvenile prison time as possible. The prison builder paid them a stipend per head and they became millionaires.

With children around us being sold to the machine, young adults becoming cannon fodder in a questionable war, and the general high idealism of younger 20 somethings (and the general boredom of rural Pennsylvania) I was apt to be interested in his tails of possible martial law, the central fear of the FEMA and  rex 84 conspiracy theory.

We met up at his house, a rented farm property complete with a barn where his many mechanical side projects were hid away. We'd head out to that barn with a twelve pack in hand and play poker, share stories, shoot darts. Inevitably the topic of revolution would arise.

"I like being up here in the hills. I'm growing a garden this year. I have a field to hunt in. I can clear out these stalls and grow some pigs. When you think about it, I can survive up here without anything from town." Farmer Steve.

I told Steve how he reminded me of Dick Proenneke. When he was 50 Dick retired and moved to Alaska, lived off the land with only the material possessions he could carry to his new home in backpacks. He built a whole compound to live in with a cabin, a tower for keeping his food from bears, eventually a wall around it all as I recall.

"That's probably where we'd need to be."

Alaska?

"Well think about it. There is a road to my house. If I was off the grid nothing could ever touch me."

The content of his new found views was getting pretty hard to beat around, so into the bush I went.

You are saying that living self sufficiently isn't enough because we are eventually going to be rounded up like the holocaust?

"Well, here's what I think. We have all this debt, and people are out of work. People are already stealing from one another. Around here there are guys who come siphon gas out of your tanks at night. I had to get a camera in case of that. I have had a break-in in the barn but the hit the side full of rotten potatoes and didn't get to see any of my quads I've been working on. My shop got hit and like eighteen hundred in chainsaws are gone"

So you're saying eventually society will just come apart?

" I really think so. Everybody I know is talking about how they don't know if they can make it to the next month and some of them even say stuff like they'll do whatever it takes. One guy tells me 'there's plenty of everything out there, we just have to start taking it.'"

Was he wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt?

"What's that?"

Nevermind. I think that stuff is a sign of the times. Look at the market. People get scared and the market plummets. The fear is that if they are the last person with their hands under the weight they will crush their fingers against the ground. So they dump their stock. But what happens before anything big hits the ground?

"What?"

The bailout. Our system of money is a con. Money costs more and more every year, that's why your dollar today buys less tomorrow. If you saved a nickel in 1960 to watch a movie at the theater today you show up $9.45 short, and here you thought with a dime you could bring your wife. When money is as messed up as that it leads you to believe they can solve this problem as stupidly as we got into it and I'm sure that's what will happen.

"That's it though. I think it's like a diversion."

What, money?

"Yeah. Ever notice how some people don't take it seriously and then they have it all? Ted Turner was millions upside down and how he's one of the richest men on Earth. I think some people realize it's a game and some don't."

Well what about the people who went upside down and now they work at Wal-Mart? His story is only fun because it worked out.

"Well what I'm saying is, I think money is a diversion to get us into a daily grind, get us competing with one another, at eachothers throats, sneaking into barns, stealing gas, and the people who control money have enough because they have all of ours because they are the government. And what do we really work for?"

He had me. I didn't know.

"The national debt."

Yeah but what does that really get anybody? The debt?

"All of that money that goes to taxes just pays the interest on the national debt."

But the national debt is just made up. Nobody got ripped off. Nobodies waiting for a check.

"The Chinese are."

I'm sure they got the money to buy our debt from the same place we loan ourselves money from. It's like a credit card. Nobody had to turn the thermostat down because someone didn't pay the credit card bill. It's just interest.

We went back and forth like this for some time. I was reluctant to accept his point. Some things about the Nation don't make sense but I might have assumed it was because I just didn't have the intellect to understand our financial system.

Whether he was right or wrong he had gotten to me at an interesting time in my life. I was coping with never being able to find work in the midst of the recession. I had anger from my combat experience and dealing with the bureaucracy of Veterans Affairs. I subsisted on the Gi Bill which was ample for an ordinary life, but it wouldn't last forever.

With these little talks about inequities between citizen and government, or our outrage and the mutiple felons in our local govt, I started feeling comfortable pushing myself back from society. I grew my own vegetable garden, which, in any context, is a wholly gratifying and therapeutic experience. I also stopped buying brand name cigarettes to roll my own instead. I brewed beer and collected bulk foods, often having over a month of protein and carbs on hand if not dairy and other 'luxuries'. Self reliance eventually become 'survivalism' is you use it to disconnect from the world. Maybe I never got that far but I started to let certain other purchases slide. I let my vehicle registration and safety sticker age to roughly 2 years expired. Revolutionary indeed.

Eventually, it led me to kill.

I tried not to act nauseous in front of the other hunters as I reached into the chest cavity and pulled out the lungs with my bear hands. I have had trouble forgiving myself since. A deer, not terribly large, gunned down with a 30-06. A fellow large North American Mammal. I ate it for breakfast lunch and dinner. No antibiotics, no MSG, no RBST, free range organic. Healthy all natural grass fed protein. But still, the blood on my hands.

In the summer I'd spend much of my time chopping wood with an axe, running, biking and doing 200 hundred push ups in as few minutes as possible, then trying to beat my time a few days later.


Steve and I would have another talk about things we'd read, strategies we'd learned to be self sufficient. We'd sit down and write a list of any food we could grow and then go find all of the seeds and write a schedule for planting along with notes. Watermelons, from Africa and die many degrees before it even frosts. Eggplants, start in a window several weeks early.

"You think we could grown rice?"

Yes, but I've seen them plan the stuff in Korea. Seems like a bitch-load of work for something I could buy a 5-year supply of for a week's worth of beer money.

"Good point. Where can we get vacuum sealed buckets then?"

My dad, as it turned out, was about ten times more convinced that the world was going to collapse than we were. I discovered this while remarking upon the price of gold.

I knew I should have bought it at $485.

"How's that?"

The TV just said gold is $1200 an ounce. I thought about investing in it at $485 two years ago and getting 4 ounces. I'd have made a good deal of money selling today.

"It's not about high and low Don, it's a ticket out of the country. It's a couple loafs of bread when people are shooting each other for it."

And that's when it all started to unravel.

I had always seen my dad as a product of his upbringing. If my son someday is as smart as I am I'm going to tell him all about my parents and hope he can tell me what I'm all about. I'm pretty sure my psychoanalysis of my dad is on point as he almost never surprises me.

Grandma was a severe presbyterian of some kind of 'end of the world' sect. Dad had become as dead set in his Atheism as his mother had been in her bible thumping, more than likely as a protest against her. How would you feel about the ideas that kept your mother in church 7 days a week while you needed her?

Eventually this happenstance conversation with my dad  came to undo my new world view. But not before, the trip to Wal-Mart.

Steve and I were a few beers into a case and I'd lost some money to him at darts. I was nearly about to win it back when he proposed we stop playing as was his style.

"Let's go buy some ammo."

My reaction to this was almost aways something like, Fuck yes! Why?

"I just want to know I have enough."

Perhaps his paranoia came from the fact that we had just ripped a bowl a few times. We were once again comparing notes on how to survive the enslavement of the human race. Step one, avoid the bread lines, they are a trap. Step two,I don't really remember so we'll just skip to having enough ammo.

We got high and decided to go buy some Ak-47 ammo, which, at the time, seemed like the patriotic thing to do.

Upon perusing Wal-Marts selection we decided that prices on ammo had become totally fucked.

"It never cost this much before. I bought like a thousand rounds for 100 dollars before. This is 40 rounds for $15. That's roughly,,, a 250 buck difference for a thousand rounds."

Don't forget tax.

"Yeah, fuck this."

We searched around and found out we weren't the only ones with a government enslavement phobia. The prices of ammo were like the price of gold. Spiraling upwards out of control.


Our initial reaction of course was not to give up, but to price equipment for making our own shells, which it turned out, was also climbing in price. Whenever there is a lot of money to be made, cries of conspiracy are not far behind. So what of the conspiracy to make our conspiracy cost more?

Look at my father and see the product of fear mongering. He can tell you the financial system, or bird flu, or political upheaval will bring about the end. Drilled into his head by an end times quoting religious mother and a childhood in the Cold War. The world ending was omnipresent in my father's mind for his formative years.

My childhood was spent seeing a world of plenty. The 90's provided for all and new wealth in technology and dot-com booms fueled a nouveau riche as well. Now, albeit in an economic lull, I started to question why the ammo makers were so rich in a time of fear.

Fear is the ultimate motivator. It's great advertising. Narcissism? Let's put fear and narcissism together. It's happened before.

Let's dissect the beliefs.

Grandma- God is good, devil is bad. The good are the people who pray and go to church and bad are out sinning and having short term fun.

Dad- Gold is Good, debt is bad. The good people provide for themselves and the bad people are out running up credit cards and buying motorcycles.

Steve and I- People are good, enslaving people is bad. The good people fight against the New World Order and the bad people are the unprepared who will sell out their own families to get bumped ahead to the VIP breadlines.

Call us crazy but during this time frame, The Road, I am Legend etc etc *** all came out to reflect on the numbers of people who were apt to receive the rapture message.


I realized the common elements between all these various raptures. I have knowledge of the end of the world. If you don't believe in my message you are a sheep who won't be saved. I am saved and that makes me better and wiser than you.

It's why the Jehovah's Witness is not afraid to be rude to you and continuously harass you to listen to him. It's why people have been burned at the stake. It's why we went on a ammo bender. Belief in the end times and the urgency of now to prepare. Grandma prayed, dad bought gold, I bought ammo.

In the same few short months that it took to get on board with the fun of frenzied paranoia, I excused myself from it. I searched online for anybody who could offer me any proof of government prison camps. I found that most people would just curse your out for not being on board with their beliefs.

What made me more ashamed that I'd entertained these notions of conspiracy is that like my father, I'm a shameless atheist. Only I didn't do it to rebel. The conspiracy theory as I came to realize is a whole lot like religion. The absence of proof is actually seen as evidence. 

In reading up on lists of purported FEMA prison camps locations, I found out that the military base I had lived on was marked on a google earth map as containing a prison large enough to hold 10,000 citizens captive. I had been stationed there for 2 years and explored every corner of the base and never found anything of the sort. The buildings that were supposed to house prisoners were a couple of old barracks that were renovated.

I pointed this out in a youtube video. I asked why they would enslave people in military bases when military bases would still serve a purpose during martial law. Why don't they assume college campuses would become prisons since the intelligentsia would be rounded up and nullified?  Or hey, ever see a Wal-Mart that wasn't made out of this cinderblock walls?

My video had over 8700 views at press time and almost 99% of comments are just insults to me, and anyone who comments positively on my ideas gets spam flagged until I unspam their comment.

I dug further and found out that some of the people making videos showing purported prison camps and railyards admitted it was just a scam to get a bunch of youtube hits fast.

It was a fun and entertaining horror story to pound some beers about in a barn in the winter of Pennsylvania but it was a fad that went out with Bush's presidency and the very valid cries of an over-powerful executive branch that came with it.

Until....

By the Spring of 09 I was off of it and had joined in the mocking of those still on board. When talking with Steve I'd still refer to the 'Break out' as he coined it. The mythical time when society would crumble leaving us to succeed as our ability allowed. I think we' d have made a good stand. Until the infrared camera helicopters came and gunned us down in the corn field. Fuckers.

He kind of gave up on it too. I might have inspired him when I told him I was going to move to Texas to follow up on a new life. He ended up moving to Alaska temporarily but came home to keep the shop alive.

The first time I came home to visit he enthusiastically showed me the pictures from his 5,000  mile drive across the continent.

In retrospect our fears of society crumbling seem funny from the perspective of now living in peaceful affluent  Austin. Then I think back about how much harder Pennsylvania was hit by the economy. I had my apartment broken into and hundreds worth of my possessions stolen. Steve's home and place of business were ripped off. We were somewhat entitled to our concealed carry permits.

I guess you can say Steve and I are 'off' now. I don't call, I don't know his screen names. He's not that kind of friend. I can't imagine what an Email from Steve would look like and I don't care to find out. I know what his head looks like and I'm sure I'll see it again.

We talked a few times about buying some dual sport motorcycles and driving them on and off road together. I figure one of these years I'll call him up to tell him he has 6 months to get one and then I'll drive all 1750 miles up there. I can get that old Pontiac out of the garage and running again and tow a bike trailer up there and ride around for a week with him. I'm positive it would pan out. I don't know if we'd ever bring up 'The Breakout'. I know I'm pretty embarrassed about it sometimes.