Anarchist to Abolitionist: A Bad Quaker's Journey

Santa Clara County, California
September 1961

As a child, I was told that I was born at Doctors General Hospital in San Jose California. The problem here is that I can find no proof of such a place ever existing, other than on my birth certificate. But there are possible solutions to this little mystery. Either I have misremembered what I was told over and over, or the state of California made a mistake when they sent me a copy of my birth certificate many years ago. Or my mother was mistaken and/or lied to me. Or there was a universe/dimensional shift and I am now in the universe where Doctors General Hospital of San Jose has always been called Santa Clara Valley Medical Center. Or finally, there is some other reason that I haven't thought of to explain this confusion. Who knows, sometimes an embarrassing lawsuit forces an institution to change its soiled name. It's difficult to tell which scenario is correct since I was really young at the time and have no memory of the event. But the strongest evidence supports the theory that I was born somewhere.

In all actuality, it only seems to really matter where and when, precisely, that a person is born to adherents of the religion of the State, which wants as much personal and verifiable information on every single one of its subjects as it can gather. In all my years, I have never been given a clear explanation as to why these things should matter to anyone else. Historically, such details were not important. After all, birth is an event that the individual child was present for, but had no say in the matter. An example of a birth date and place that didn't matter was the incredibly wealthy Howard Hughes. No one alive knows for sure when or where he was born. There are contradicting theories of his birth date and place, but there is no solid way to prove any of them. It never mattered as he accumulated wealth and it still doesn't matter now that he's dead.

Another more important example is Jesus Christ. Sure, some big shot hundreds of years after the fact, with no documentation whatsoever, just declared it to be on December 25th, conveniently a pagan holiday celebrated for thousands of years before Christ, but that's about the one day we know for sure it didn't happen. Also, no one knows where it happened. Again, a big shot pointed to a cave hundreds of years later because they had a fuzzy feeling, but then some other big shot pointed to somewhere else based on their fuzzy feeling. So is that how we determine history? The depth of a fuzzy feeling? But more importantly, why would it matter? We know it wasn't important to anyone during the first few hundred years after his death, because in all the writings about him at the time, no one mentioned it. Jesus' birthday didn't matter until the marriage of the church and the government. Then, suddenly it mattered.

The day of your birth only seems to be useful to those who cling to authority as a way to restrict your behavior and keep you on the plantation as a tax/debt slave. Oh don't get me wrong, they teach you with great enthusiasm that your birth date is important. There's cake, a party, and all the entrapping of a significant event. But is any of that real? No. It's all a show to control you.

You're 5 years old? You must attend school so we can teach you what to think.

You can't drive that car! You're only 15 years 4 months. You can't even begin to learn to drive until you're 15 years 6 months. Unless you live in Alaska where those rascals can drive at 14.

You're 18, so you just became smart enough to vote for your masters, and to be forced into the military where we'll teach you how to kill other 18 year olds. But don't even think about having a beer for 3 more years. That is, unless you live in Nicaragua where a 14 year old can order 151 proof rum with a hamburger and no one will even blink.

These are all just age discrimination edicts made up by authoritarians within the last one hundred years or so, with no basis in true law. The State feasts upon arbitrary rules enforced by unthinking dunderheads and obeyed by cowards afraid to stand up for their own freedom. Humans are fast become a race of Vogons, sludging along, waiting for the correct forms to be processed so they can enforce random laws made up by other Vogons, who themselves are just obeying orders.

If you're unfamiliar with the word Vogon, do a Wikipedia search. I don't have room in this book to define my obscure references, and footnotes annoy me. Alright, the rant is turned off for now. Back to the story.

Sometime after my birth in California we moved to an unincorporated area of Appalachia called Sunshine Kentucky. Sunshine; what a happy place name. Place names tell you much about an area and the people who settled there long ago. Kentucky has place names like Flat Gap or Grassy Creek or Big Sandy. They tell you something about the place. What do you need to know about Beauty Ridge Kentucky that's not already right there in the place name?

Place names in the Mojave Desert, on the other hand, are not so happy sounding. Even though the sun shines far more in the Mojave than in eastern Kentucky, I don't know of any area of the Mojave called "Sunshine". The Mojave has place names like Bloody Canyon, Poison Canyon, Death Valley, and Devil's Postpile, but we'll get more into that later.

I think we only lived at Sunshine for a few months before moving to Burrows Road, Campbell California. I don't know why we moved back and forth so many times over the course of my childhood, but I suspect my dad got the itch to wander now and then and he just couldn't fight it. I won't list all the times we moved in this book, but to give you an idea I changed schools sixteen times before I graduated high school in January 1979, at the age of 17.

My earliest true memory is from our home on Burrows Road. I remember the back yard had a fence traversing the yard, with a gate and an arbor near the middle. I remember the bus that was parked just outside that gate. It was the bus my dad used to move the family back to California from Kentucky, however I have no memory of that move, nor of ever entering the bus.

It was on Burrows Road that I was given a dog. He was a long haired dachshund puppy named Shorty. Although my family has told me many stories about Shorty's arrival and his antics as a puppy, I have no true memory of him until we moved to Coalinga, California some years later.

Oh, don't get me wrong. I could tell you stories about Shorty. Stories that I have been told that, at one time, I thought I remembered. Like how I was messing with his food and he bit me, so I bit him back, or how he would cry when I would cry, but those are not my memories. Truth is more important than a good story, and this is about truth, not about a story told to a child.

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