Your Travel Papers, Comrade!by
Vin Suprynowicz
There seems to be some fuss about the inadequate security that allowed the personal information of 8,738 people who received licenses or ID cards from the Department of Motor Vehicles this winter to be looted in the early morning hours of March 7 from the DMV office at Donovan Way in Northtown – along with sufficient blank forms and computerized photo equipment to generate 1,700 really good fake IDs, presumably adequate to get your hypothetical terrorist and his non-X-rayed 50-pound carry-on deep into the serpentine line of tourists waiting to go through the metal detectors for the D Gates at McCarran on a given Sunday afternoon. "The state is extremely sorry that this happened," intones Ginny Lewis, czarina of the internal passport division, making one wonder if the state can actually cry, and if so how large a hanky the state might need. The state initially insisted the hard-drive of the stolen computer was regularly wiped clean. After actually checking with its computer contractor last week, however, the state said, "Whoops." What no one has been asking, however, is why on earth we allow the government to collect all this sensitive ID data, in the first place. I got my high school diploma in 1968, in an eastern land far, far away. In the ensuing 30-odd years, no one has ever asked to see it. I certainly have never been asked to send in money to get my high school diploma "renewed," or to report my new residential address so that could be permanently engraved on my "new, valid, Nevada" high school diploma, or to go on and pose for a "new diploma photo." The one I got in 1968 is still considered good. The year before I got my high school diploma, I got a driver's license. It was a plain piece of greenish cardboard with my name and date of birth on it – no photo. Why isn't that still good? When I change my address or grow a mustache or shave it off, does that alter my ability to remember the shape of a stop sign or how to parallel park? Of course not. What passes for a "driver's license" today is just a way to squeeze more money out of us to keep a huge police-state tracking bureaucracy at work – paying for our own bondage through an internal passport that allows the officer's onboard computer to access our Social Slave number and through it all the details of our lives, the very kind of "travel papers" that American audiences used to boo the Gestapo men for demanding of railway passengers in the old movies set in Nazi Germany or occupied France. Next time you're asked for your "driver's license," try offering the nice officer your graduation certificate from a certified driver's education class. You'll find that's not what they want, at all. They want a standardized government document carrying an up-to-date address where you sleep, to make it more convenient for the men in the black ski masks if and when they choose to come arrest you in the night. A reader writes in, referring to Sunni Maravillosa's lengthy interview on my new book. "Vin – You come across much less scary in an interview. Lots of good stuff here, but I think I'm most focused on this quote: 'The gun-rights guys think it's just great for the cops to lock up all the potheads, and the potheads think it's just fine for the feds to disarm the gun nuts.' "I think it's been over 15 years now – close to half my life – that I've been saying it would be a horrible, tragic mistake to decriminalize weapons without decriminalizing drugs, or the other way around. I believe it would result in far greater bloodshed and violence, including innocents caught in the crossfire, than even the current situation. Only by decriminalizing weapons and drugs simultaneously will an unambiguous, moral message of responsibility be presented. The violence that resulted might be nasty and brutal, but it would certainly be short-lived. "Thank you for your writing, even if it will never convince my sister. – Ian R." I replied: Hi, Ian – The question seems moot, to me. Virtually all dealers in proscribed plant extracts have guns, right now, regardless of any law. Since violence is caused primarily by Prohibition, and not by the drugs themselves (if heroin and cocaine were the price of sugar, why would anyone commit crimes to get them, any more than we commit crimes today to get our sugar, handed out free in coffee shops?), legalizing all drugs would result in a reduction of violence – just as the end of alcohol Prohibition ended the violence of the bootlegging era in 1933. To discuss the "schedule" on which we should "allow" people to start exercising certain of their unalienable rights is to join with the Prohibitionist enemy. This is like saying chattel slavery is bad, so we should start gradually freeing the slaves over a period of some decades, as we judge them "ready." You thereby take personal moral responsibility for every whipping, every death, every individual hour of misery and uncompensated toil, from the moment you propose your "gradual schedule" for restoring some limited amount of freedom. There is no "proper sequence." The drug most likely to foment violence is alcohol, which is already legal. By your own theory, then, total machine gun decriminalization is 72 years behind schedule.
Vin Suprynowicz [send him mail] is assistant editorial page editor of the daily Las Vegas Review-Journal and author of The Black Arrow. Copyright © 2005 Vin Suprynowicz |
