DMV

What a weird thing is the California motor vehicle place.  You can make a convenient appointment, but the first available time will be in three weeks, and don't plan to have choice of day or time.

Best bet is to drive 70 miles east, out to El Centro, and just forget the appointment routine.  The probably won't be able to speak English.  That's OK.  I don't speak government, so that puts us on equal footing.  We won't understand one another, and neither of us will really care.

These agencies are more foreign to me than to most people, as near as I can tell.  They are as unpleasant too me as an occupying army or local gang might be to the average person.  I do my best to suck it up.  Many people don't find the bullying of authority to be anything peculiar or wrong.

Those are the same people who would have found slavery the way of society, no matter if they were slave or master, which is pretty much the majority, considering it was the norm for thousands of years in every part of the world until europeans decided it was no good.  Now most people act like they would never go along with such heavy handed business.  But that is only because that is what everyone else seems to think.

They go along with the whole DMV "Driving is a privilege not a right" routine.  Who is granting this privilege?  The same people who have made jumping through the hoops to get the privilege renewed a privilege.  If you are lucky, you can get an appointment to get your privilege.  It is a privilege to get the red tape handled, not a right.

Driving is a privilege.  Driving sanely and safely is obviously and option; like turn signals on BMWs.

I'm going to drive almost to Yuma because it will end up taking less time than waiting around in El Cajon or San Diego.  Out there, most people are illegal anyway and don't need no stinking driver's license.  Sanctuary cities and all that.  I don't know how the get it ll worked out, but it seems they can do OK.  Cops only beat on them if they think no legal services will be brought to bear.

That is the big myth in the US.  People think police are out to nail citizens based on race or ethnicity.  They do like all bullies and target those who are least threatening to them.  If they think you can bring nasty lawyers down on them then they lay off.  It is about power, and that sometimes coincides with race.

I'm always polite at the DMV, and pretend that I respect the people there and what they represent.   The truth is that I do not respect "the badge", the agency, the state or the way the state is set up.  That makes me a liar.  I do respect the workers there, to a small degree.  They do not see themselves as part of anything bad.  Such workers rarely do.   And the public largely plays its role too.  People herd in there and indicate a need to be guided and prodded to behave halfway civilly.  They like the firm control of the surrogate parent the state has become.

I can't change it, but I don't think it is good to pretend it is OK and wonderful, either.  I've never liked bullies of any kind.  But even in childhood I noticed that if a kid gained acceptance by his bullies, he'd immediately conform to their mode of behavior and bully someone else as soon as he got the chance.  So, by conforming properly so that the state doesn't torture people they feel all responsible and support measures taken against those who don't readily conform.  It is the old weak willed, no principles game in action all over again.

The trick is to maintain one's integrity while not falling into the trap of fighting everyone and everything in a fruitless quest of some kind.  Don't tilt at windmills like Don Quixote.

I think the set up is wrong and unholy.  Many others have no issue with it, as long as they think the force of the state and the whims and prejudices and perversions of those with badges won't be brought down to harm them.  It doesn't occur to them that this is not the way people should be treated and peace maintained.  Driving is a privilege, as is living, sleeping, walking around taking in the sights, fishing, and washing windows.  It's all a privilege, granted grudgingly by the state, overseen by armed an deadly agents.

I find all that quite bizarre.  That most normal, and otherwise decent, people do not find it so puzzles me greatly.  It makes me wonder if I am simply not seeing what I think I see.  Is the sky not really blue on a cloudless day?  Is water not really wet?  My perception of reality must be distorted, or else most people have been duped.  Or maybe just bullied to the point of compliance a pretense.  And pretense has become such a habit that they don't dare stop.  And maybe people don't even know how to stop.

Most find every reason to convince themselves that they aren't pretending.   No doubt there are studies to back them up, depending up the issue and needs of the day.  Sometimes new studies trash old ones, and then newer ones reaffirm the ones that got trashed.

It may well be the the evolution of the species requires a collectivist majority of the easily led who fear being weird or different, all enjoying the herd mentality and whatever privileges they are granted.  They get to choose teams with which to identify, and so they can have internal enemies.  They can bicker over the best ways to combat common enemies like poverty, terrorism, drugs, inequality, and even privilege itself.  The important thing is to confine their thinking within that framework.

Over time the people who don't or won't fit will get weeded out.    Force is an effective tool, and the state claims a monopoly on the right to use force as it sees fit.   It will grudgingly cede the privilege of self defense to an individual,  but it is a risky privilege to exercise.  It may or may not land one in as much difficulty as the assault from which he was defending himself.   It is a roll of the dice.

El Centro, here we come, with a battery of documentation in hand, hoping to prove our existence to the satisfaction of a state whose mistyped numbers place my entrance into this life at a time a couple of hundred days different than other agencies and states have claimed for many many years.  Should be fun.

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