Trying to Keep the Faith
Sam Aurelius Milam III
Starting in the late 1960's, I wrote a lot of letters. I was trying
to correct some of the evils that I was starting to notice in the government,
and in various of its ancillary institutions. I used letters because I'd been taught that the only legitimate way to change things is to work within
the system. I subsequently realized that, at least so far as letters
are concerned, I'd been misinformed. My letters were ineffective. My efforts to reform certain policies of the insurance companies is a good example. Twenty or so years later, I documented that situation under the heading Lie Ability, in my essay More Adventures of the
Lone Raver. It's available in Pharos.
In the early 1970's, I joined a libertarian discussion group. At about the same time, the Libertarian Party was formed. A member of our discussion
group decided to run for office and we converted the discussion group into
his campaign committee. After that, I registered voters, passed out
Libertarian Party fliers, manned (manned, ladies, not personed) the Libertarian
booth at the county fair, and so forth. Eventually, I realized that
the Libertarian Party is inherently incapable of solving the problems.
When the libertarians became Libertarians, the incentives changed.
They stopped trying to fix the government, and started trying to become a
part of it. The Libertarian Party was defanged by election rules and
regulations, and by its vested interest in attracting voters. I documented
that under the heading The LibertaRepubliCrats, in More Adventures of
the Lone Raver.
Sometime during the early or middle 1980's, I began studying with the Constitutional Patriots. They were trying to use the courts to solve the problems. It seemed, at first, like a useful strategy. I learned a lot from them
but I soon decided that they would inevitably fail. There isn't any
remedy in the courts. The courts are part of the government and, therefore,
part of the problem. See Courting Disaster, in More Adventures of the
Lone Raver.
Twenty or so years of those kinds of unsuccessful strategies finally convinced me that I wasn't likely to accomplish anything useful by working within the
system. Legal methods of opposing the government are regulated into
uselessness. Anything that might actually be effective is illegal.
Since nothing else had worked, I decided to present my arguments directly
to the people, in essays. While I was transferring my hopes from the Constitutional patriots to the essays, I studied a lot of documents. I read the U.S. constitution and its amendments, the Articles of Confederation, the Declaration of Independence, and a good part of the Journals of the Continental
Congress. I didn't just run my eyes along the lines while replaying
in my head the crap that they taught me in school. I actually read
the documents. I acquired a good understanding of such things as liberty,
sovereignty, jurisdiction, despotism, and the doctrine of social contract.
I wrote various essays on those subjects. They're available under the
heading Liberty, Sovereignty, and the Doctrine of Social Contract, in Pharos. By the early 1990's, I'd realized that
the essays were ineffective. People weren't reading them. In
January of 1994, I started this newsletter. Sometime during the late
1990's, I began building my websites. Neither the essays, the newsletter,
nor the websites have been effective. They've gone mostly unnoticed.
Back in the 1980's, while I was writing essays, and studying, I often referred to dictionaries. I acquired an understanding of the importance of the
meanings of words, the distinctions between such meanings, and the ways that
people disregard such distinctions. I became aware of how word meanings
can change, over the years. That prompted me to start a collection
of old dictionaries. The collection presently includes 36 volumes,
going back as far as 1828. Also because of my interest in the importance
of word definitions and word usage, I named my home at the time Mere Keep.
The name came out of the dictionaries. In Old and Middle English, a
mere was a boundary or a limit. A keep was a place to protect something.
Thus, Mere Keep was a place to protect boundaries. The boundaries that
I wanted to protect were the boundaries between ideas, such as sin and crime,
freedom and slavery, rights and privileges, currency and money, 
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