Lost and Found
Sam Aurelius Milam III
During the 1980s, after several years of working with the Libertarians, I lost my confidence in their legislative strategy for opposing the police state. Instead, I began to work with the Constitutional Patriots, who were using a judicial strategy. I began to study old documents and write essays. Those essays, and others, are presently available in Pharos. For my studies and my writing, it was useful for me to know the meanings of words as they had
been used at the time that the old documents were written. An associate, understanding that, gave me a gift, an 1889 edition of Bouvier’s Law Dictionary. I used the dictionary extensively and I still have it. Scanned images of the definitions are presently available in The Sovereign’s Library. The acquisition of that old dictionary motivated me to start acquiring old dictionaries.
I found most of them at flea markets. I now have a collection of them that goes back to 1828. In recent decades, my
writing has been mostly about more current things, and I don’t use
the old dictionaries much any more, but I still have them. Sometimes, when I bought an old dictionary, I didn’t get around to examining it until several months after I’d bought it. In the pages of one such dictionary, when I did eventually examine it, I found what I believe to be a photograph of an American serviceman.
The dictionary was published in 1968 but, of course, the photograph could have been older than that, or more recent. I don’t know enough military lore to recognize the uniform, or even the era. I suppose that it might even be some other kind of uniform but, to me, it looks like a military uniform. That’s what I’ve assumed it to be, for all of these years. If it turns out that I’m wrong about that, and he wasn’t actually a member of the military, then I’m appropriately embarrassed, and I apologize for my ignorance. The man in the photograph is a young black man. He had a smile on his face but it seems to
me that he had fear in his eyes. If he really was wearing a military uniform, if he really was being sent off to war, and if it really was 1968, then such fear would be easy to understand.
On the back of the photograph, hand written, is the inscription, “Mothers Baby Boy”. There wasn’t any way for me to return the photograph to her. It had been a flea market transaction, anonymous, no receipts, nothing, and it was months in the past.
I wonder if she ever knew what happened to the photograph. Maybe she remembered where she’d put it but hadn’t expected anybody to sell the dictionary. Maybe she didn’t remember where she’d put it, and spent months looking for it. Either way, I expect that she grieved for its loss. Maybe her son came back home again, safe and healthy, and the only thing that she lost was the photograph. Maybe not. I don’t know, but I’m sorry for her loss, whatever it was, and for having been, albeit unwittingly, a part of it. I’ve had a copy of the photograph, and an offer to return
the photograph to its rightful owner, on one website or another for
many years. I don’t know of any other way to find the owner, or
her surviving family. So far, nobody has claimed the photograph.
The copy is presently available at the address shown below.
Of the People, By the People,
For the People
Sam Aurelius Milam III
People who presume to be voting members of a democracy should take the trouble to learn about such things as jurisdiction, sovereignty, and social contract. If they don’t, then they’ll get the kind of government that they deserve. That is, there’ll be government of the people
but not government by the people or government for the people.Lost Angeles
Sam Aurelius Milam III
There’s a lot of archeological evidence of ancient societies that had large cities and advanced technologies. Many of them depended on
sophisticated water supply systems. When the water supply systems
failed, the societies died and the cities crumbled. The cities have
been abandoned for centuries, or maybe even for millennia. When I
consider the ruins of such lost cities, I think of Los Angeles. | November 2024 | Frontiersman,0c/o 4984 Peach Mountain Drive, Gainesville, Georgia 30507 http://frontiersman.org.uk/ | Page 1 |
