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The Ballot Box Versus The Bullet Box

The Civil War killed more Americans than all the other wars combined. Over 675,000 fatalities including civilians.

The Ballot Box Versus The Bullet Box

THE BALLOT BOX VERSUS THE BULLET BOX

by Loren Edward Pearce

I was raised in the USA to believe that if we have a grievance or a complaint about a law or a government policy or a behavior, that all we need to do is contact our elected representative and work within “the system” to get it changed.   We can form grassroots organizations, pass out flyers, buy advertising space on billboards and, of course, use social media to spread our message in order to get what we don’t like, changed.  

However, those of us who have tried these activist methods, have been met with deep disappointment. Seldom do elected officials show any interest or bother to respond to our letters and phone calls.  The standard excuse is that we, a constituent, are like spit in an ocean, our issue is drowned out by millions of other constituent issues and the elected official is simply spread too thin to address our concerns.  

Lincoln reportedly said, “Among free men there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet”   Yet, appeal to the bullet Lincoln finally did when the South would not align themselves with the dictates of the North.   Lincoln was right though, it was not a successful appeal.  Yes, the North won the Civil War, but at what cost?   State’s rights and the 10th amendment were never the same after the civil war. The civil war gave birth to the federal government we have today, vast, sprawling alphabet soup agencies with their own law enforcement branches, imposing their wills on local communities.

Said to have over 10,000 burials, the Marietta National Cemetery contains the remains of soldiers killed at nearby Kennesaw Mountain and other battles of Sherman’s Atlanta Campaign. (civilwartalk.com)

As to bullets, the Civil War killed more Americans than all the other wars combined.  Over 675,000 fatalities including civilians.  The wounded envied the dead.  Death from a large caliber civil war bullet wound was agonizingly slow as many of the wounded lay on the battle field, no morphine, no pain killers and it was not uncommon to live for days before the sweet relief of death finally came.

Recently, I was at the Marietta battle field near Atlanta, and the museum describes the horror of the battles that took place there, brother against brother, fellow citizens speaking the same language, slaughtering and killing one another. The screams of agony from the wounded were described in diaries as the wounded lay piled up among the dead, waiting for their death.

So yes, the bullet box is not the answer.  But if the ballot box does not work, then what does work?  During a recent visit with the Bundy family at their ranch, they described the frustration of contacting many politicians, many elected representatives and appointed government officials and nothing, no response, no interest, no concern. I like to call it, “playing ping pong against a mattress.” 

Our pompous, egotistical politicians like to slap themselves on the back on how they try to be responsive to their constituents and how any person within their district can rely on them to get answers and bring about change.   Lip service, platitudes, nothing more. Neither I nor the Bundys expect the politicians to agree with us, what we expect is dialog and a search for a solution.  

If a politician or government official is spread too thin to handle the demands of the office, then we need to add more elected officials to a district or find a way to handle the demands of the office  by removing the incumbent politician.  

Along with the Bundys, we have thousands of prisoners who have not been to trial, who have not been convicted and who have been denied a presumption of innocence until proven guilty.  They are subject to solitary confinement and to other unspeakable atrocities, while never having been convicted.  That is absolutely, totally, indisputably, unequivocally unacceptable.   

If politicians and their ballot boxes cannot or will not solve that problem, then what will?

3 Comments on The Ballot Box Versus The Bullet Box

  1. “If politicians and their ballot boxes cannot or will not solve that problem, then what will?”

    The Jury Box.

    Not the counterfeit Jury Box administered by a counterfeit federal government, but the true Jury Box administered by the people themselves as exemplified in so many cases dating back through Ancient times.

    George Mason
    1787
    “The judiciary of the United States is so constructed and extended, as to absorb and destroy the judiciaries of the several states; thereby rendering laws as tedious, intricate, and expensive, and justice as unattainable by a great part of the community, as in England; and enabling the rich to oppress and ruin the poor.”

    George Mason
    1788
    “Among the enumerated powers, Congress are to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises, and to pay the debts, and to provide for the general welfare and common defence; and by that clause (so often called the sweeping clause) they are to make all laws necessary to execute those laws. Now, suppose oppressions should arise under this government, and any writer should dare to stand forth, and expose to the community at large the abuses of those powers; could not Congress, under the idea of providing for the general welfare, and under their own construction, say that this was destroying the general peace, encouraging sedition, and poisoning the minds of the people? And could they not, in order to provide against this, lay a dangerous restriction On the press? Might they not even bring the trial of this restriction within the ten miles square, when there is no prohibition against it? Might they not thus destroy the trial by jury?”

    John Dickinson
    1767
    “The matter being thus stated, the assembly of New York either had, or had not, a right to refuse submission to that act. If they had, and I imagine no American will say they had not, then the parliament had no right to compel them to execute it. If they had not this right, they had no right to punish them for not executing it; and therefore no right to suspend their legislation, which is a punishment. In fact, if the people of New York cannot be legally taxed but by their own representatives, they cannot be legally deprived of the privilege of legislation, only for insisting on that exclusive privilege of taxation. If they may be legally deprived in such a case, of the privilege of legislation, why may they not, with equal reason, be deprived of every other privilege? Or why may not every colony be treated in the same manner, when any of them shall dare to deny their assent to any impositions, that shall be directed? Or what signifies the repeal of the Stamp Act, if these colonies are to lose their other privileges, by not tamely surrendering that of taxation?”

    Lysander Spooner
    1852
    “It was a principle of the Common Law, as it is of the law of nature, and of common sense, that no man can be taxed without his personal consent. The Common Law knew nothing of that system, which now prevails in England, of assuming a man’s own consent to be taxed, because some pretended representative, whom he never authorized to act for him, has taken it upon himself to consent that he may be taxed. That is one of the many frauds on the Common Law, and the English constitution, which have been introduced since Magna Carta. Having finally established itself in England, it has been stupidly and servilely copied and submitted to in the United States.“

    Lysander Spooner again:
    “For more than six hundred years—that is, since Magna Carta, in 1215—there has been no clearer principle of English or American constitutional law, than that, in criminal cases, it is not only the right and duty of juries to judge what are the facts, what is the law, and what was the moral intent of the accused; but that it is also their right, and their primary and paramount duty, to judge of the justice of the law, and to hold all laws invalid, that are, in their opinion, unjust or oppressive, and all persons guiltless in violating, or resisting the execution of, such laws.

    “Unless such be the right and duty of jurors, it is plain that, instead of juries being a “palladium of liberty”—a barrier against the tyranny and oppression of the government—they are really mere tools in its hands, for carrying into execution any injustice and oppression it may desire to have executed.

    “But for their right to judge of the law, and the justice of the law, juries would be no protection to an accused person, even as to matters of fact; for, if the government can dictate to a jury any law whatever, in a criminal case, it can certainly dictate to them the laws of evidence. That is, it can dictate what evidence is admissible, and what inadmissible, and also what force or weight is to be given to the evidence admitted. And if the government can thus dictate to a jury the laws of evidence, it can not only make it necessary for them to convict on a partial exhibition of the evidence rightfully pertaining to the case, but it can even require them [6] to convict on any evidence whatever that it pleases to offer them.

    “That the rights and duties of jurors must necessarily be such as are here claimed for them, will be evident when it is considered what the trial by jury is, and what is its object.

    “The trial by jury,” then, is a “trial by the country”—that is, by the people—as distinguished from a trial by the government.

    “It was anciently called “trial per pais”—that is “trial by the country.” And now, in every criminal trial, the jury are told that the accused “has, for trial, put himself upon the country; which country you (the jury) are.”
    “The object of this trial “by the country,” or by the people, in preference to a trial by the government, is to guard against every species of oppression by the government. In order to effect this end, it is indispensable that the people, or “the country,” judge of and determine their own liberties against the government; instead of the government’s judging of and determining its own powers over the people. How is it possible that juries can do anything to protect the liberties of the people against the government, if they are not allowed to determine what those liberties are?

    “Any government, that is its own judge of, and determines authoritatively for the people, what are its own powers over the people, is an absolute government of course. It has all the powers that it chooses to exercise. There is no other—or at least no more accurate—definition of a despotism than this.”

    Instead of the people forming grand juries, trial juries, and prosecutors ourselves, representing ourselves, to check the arbitrary power of government, instead, the criminals among us claim to be the government, and those criminals among us enforce their arbitrary will despotically upon us with impunity.

    To claim that this reversal of fortunes happened because of the Civil War is to ignore the facts that matter in the case. Ignore Shay’s Rebellion, the Whiskey Rebellion, The Alien and Sedition Acts, the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, the forming of the Democratic-Republican Party in opposition to the Nationalist Loyalist Criminal Fake Federalist Party, and ignore all the warnings printed before 1789 about the Consolidation of arbitrary power into the hands of a few Oligarchs, Aristocrats, Monied Men, Warmongers, Slave Traders, Slave Carriers, and Central Bankers, taking over a former free people in emerging free nations under the common laws of free people in perishable liberty.

  2. No more blatant example of Official unresponsiveness could be found than Gov, Kate Brown’s stony silence to our Petition for redress in the Hammond case. I’m sure that when our petitions arrived at her desk, the first thing Brown did was run to her Federal masters, then complied with their order for silence. This was the situation we found ourselves in on Jan 2, 2016, and after exhausting every normal means,took our demonstration to Malhure as a last resort. Governor Brown’s response was finally delivered on the evening of January 26,in the form of bullets. We are experiencing this same cavalier disregard for the public trust in the actions of Judge Navarro, and we are brought back to the fundamental question: What do we do as citizens when our belief in govt by the people, and our trust in the courts, is betrayed?

    • Neil I have the same question you do. What do we do when all we get out of our so called representatives is the stone wall of silence? I have thought about this long and hard and the answer I come up with is non-violent non-compliance with injustice. Gandhi showed us all the way to fight back and that is to stop cooperating with our oppressors. Our forefathers showed us the way when they held the Boston tea party. So what we need is massive non-cooperation with tyranny. Once we have that then events will unfold according to the same pattern they did with Gandhi’s actions. The government will crack down harder than ever on those who refuse to cooperate which will cause our numbers to grow exponentially, the government will turn to violence at which point they will lose the battle because everyone will turn against them. The only area where I disagree with Gandhi’s methods is when the Government turns to violence (including depriving people of their freedom) I advocate we defend ourselves at that point rather than allow them to kill us and take our freedom away. Self defense is a human right and I think we need to exercise it at that point when the government uses violence. Self defense is completely different from aggression and during self defense is the only time I will use force. So in my view we need mass non-cooperation with tyranny backed up by organized and powerful mass self defense. That in my view is the only avenue for change we have because it is quite obvious to me that the government does not serve the people and has no intention of helping us but rather plans on heaping even more tyranny and oppression upon us. Eventually we will have no choice but to do this just like our forefathers and founders were eventually backed into a corner by King George’s tyranny.

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  1. BUNDY’s and Company being Abused by Jail Officers May 11 and May 3, 2017 -Assisted by REDOUBT News – The Concord Show

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