Wednesday, July 1, 2015

Prison Sentence for Collecting Rainwater - What is the Logic between Government and Survival?


  I read this article online titled:

Man Gets Prison Sentence For Collecting Rainwater On His Own Property


And I realized a few interesting things by my reaction to reading the headline alone. Reading the headline first of all triggered a fear inside myself, which was based on a thought  along the lines of 'oh no, the government is trying to take my rainwater!' and with looking into that reaction I realized that it is essentially showing that I have a fear of 'the government' and that I seem to have created 'the government' as the boogieman in my mind. The government is not my friend, it is my enemy. It is made up of corporations and greedy people who are only after my money and who don't care about me as an individual, therefore I must defend myself from the government and be wary of whatever it is that the government is trying to implement.

That is basically the attitude that I have programmed into myself when it comes to the word 'government', and this  through all the articles that I have read over time and stories I have heard from other people about what the government apparently did to them or about how there exists corruption in government, how people are stealing our taxes, how the individual in society is being robbed of their hard-earned money by deceitful  lawmakers who misappropriate that money into their own pockets and how corporations make dirty deals with government officials to privatize public resources like water and forest land and end up polluting the area that we live in, etcetera.

So with that attitude of 'my own government is after me', I feel as though I am all alone in this world having to fend for myself and thus I am in survival mode. So upon reading an article that is about a government jailing a citizen for trying to fend for himself and his survival, I react with fear for my own survival which then results in me getting angry at this government for jailing this guy 'just because he was trying to survive'.

But it is actually fascinating that in this whole story, I don't in any moment stop to question my own reaction or question why it is in the first place  that I have come to accept that my government is 'the bad guy' and why it is that I feel the need to protect myself from my government's decisions. I mean, I immediately trust my initial reaction of fear and anger as protection and defense against the apparent evil that is threatening my livelihood but at the same time it is because of this very reaction that I am not seeing what is going on in reality and I am not seeing for example the absurd way in which things exist.

Things such as the fact that a government is supposed to be a structure of people who organize a society in a way that supports the beings in it, so that no person has to be in survival mode. I mean isn't that the whole purpose of things called 'public property', meaning that these things should go to 'the people' and serve to ease the survival of people in that society? Isn't that the purpose of the things we call 'democracy', 'economy', 'social service', 'public officers', and all things pertaining to 'social' and 'public' industry and activity, in that it should actually serve the 'public' in ways that is best for the public?

Somehow preventing someone from collecting their own water to sustain themselves doesn't fit that definition. However the fact that someone feels the need to collect their own water and to go against the law in doing so doesn't make sense either. So, looking at my own initial reaction to reading this article, it is quite fascinating to notice that we would become angry at the government for not allowing this  man to provide for his own survival but we don't even notice the underlying faults in the design of our government that this  case is actually revealing, which is that we shouldn't feel the need to pull away from the law and adapt a self-interested way of living, according to 'every man to himself', in the first place.

We don't seem to ask ourselves why it is that we have a government at all when it clearly isn't providing a supportive structure for all of us to live within and when for a great part most of us even exist in fear of and conflict with our government to the point where in the back of our mind we are thinking of ways to potentially provide for our own survival 'just in case', through for example collecting our own rain water.

And this is a very valid question to ask ourselves, of what our government is actually doing and why we even have it when it clearly isn't functioning in our best interests. So, since we do have a government that doesn't work in OUR best interest, then in whose best interest is it in fact working? Why is our government not coming up with ways to make sure that no one will ever have to fend for themselves and that each living being is supported in the best way possible? I mean, we give them that power, we place people in office which we believe to be capable of making decisions in our name and hope to have the skills  to organize large groups of individuals in ways that works out best for everyone.

Yet when people are being sentenced to jail for trying to collect resources because they aren't getting those resources from their government who 'owns' those resources, then the decisions that are being made and the ways that our government is operating is definitely not in our best interest. The judge sentencing this individual to jail should have investigated why it was that this man felt like he needed to fend for himself in the first place. He should have investigated what went wrong in the relationship between the system and this individual where a lack was created which caused a person to have to go into survival mode and make self-interested 'unlawful' decisions, which is what a judge who rules according to and based on the actual best interest of society would do. So the fact that judges don't take this approach would be our first sign that somehow the government that we have created and allowed to direct our society and our lives does not exist in the best interest of us all and thus should be changed.

Investigate a Living Income Guarantee, the only logical step any government should take to show its consideration of and care for the existence and survival of its citizens.