“We understand more than you think, Shane,” said the woman sadly. “We have a daughter, and many years ago she had to make such a choice.”
The man spoke, ruminating. “Not a bad choice so much as.” His wife looked at him. “Well, she made a strange choice. Life can be very strange, sometimes. Never mind, I’m blathering. Keep your head down for a few days and let’s see how it plays out.”
It turned out that the man from Third Section was right. I hung around in the back room of Johnny Pill’s convenience store for a couple of days until I finally got bored and said to hell with it and went back to Dundee High to enjoy what was left of my school days. I ended up walking across the stage in my gown and mortarboard that June with the rest of my class, and getting my sheepskin. I think I’ve still got it around here someplace. I didn’t see Goldberg again for a long time. Sorels was another story, but I’ll get into that in due course.
One thing I should mention. After the old couple from the Third Section had each consumed a large slice of Ma’s pecan pie with whipped cream and then left to go back to Olympia, I said to Carter with reference to the battle of Mariana, “Looks like those two Third Section operatives are more grave than cradle.”
Carter grinned at me and said, “Yeah, well, remember this night, young feller.”
“Why?” I asked.
“You just met Matt and Heather Redmond.”
* * *
When I graduated from high school, I had a stroke of luck in the gainful employment department. The Party had managed to get a couple of hiring managers into two of the major temporary agencies in Olympia. Temp agencies were one of the biggest curses of the job market in those days, along with affirmative action and the Dees Act and Third World immigrant labor. They were one of the umpteen different ways that big corporations avoided what little was left of the country’s already gutted labor laws. The multinationals who for one reason or another chose not to “outsource” their operation to India or Guatemala hired almost all their workers through the temp agencies, and so not only did they not have to provide any medical insurance or other benefits, but they could more often than not write off their labor costs as an expense for the purpose of what little taxes they paid. The temp worker was not legally employed by the place he worked for, but by the agency. He or she got a minimum or damned near minimum wage paycheck every week and that was it, and God help you if you pissed off your client’s contract manager who could cut you off at the knees and kick you out with a single phone call and no recourse. God help you if you didn’t get your ticket signed on Friday to slip through the little slot at the agency’s office. You were lucky if some Mexican foreman didn’t demand a kickback for the signature that would let you collect your minimum wage. There were people in those days, like my father, who worked for years as “temporary” employees. That is, if they were lucky enough to work for an outfit decent enough not to let them go on the very week they were due to get what few remaining benefits were on offer through the temp agency itself. In some respects the slaves on antebellum plantations in the South had more rights.
Temp agencies were also notorious for hiring illegals with only the flimsiest and most obviously forged documentation. Towards the end they didn’t even bother with asking for a forged ID, because no one was enforcing the immigration laws any more. The contract managers in the agencies wielded immense power, since they decided who got called up for work and who didn’t. It was a more sophisticated version of the old shape-up that crooked waterfront and construction unions used to run, except instead of some mobbed-up straw boss these contract managers were almost all young liberal girls who dressed like Barbie dolls and were given the power of economic life and death over men and women old enough to be their parents or even their grandparents. The ZOG always found such women to be the most malleable and conformist tools for the creation of their new, mindless managerial class. Raised in a society that was completely amoral to begin with, and indoctrinated from birth with feminist ideology and all kinds of subtle social engineering to hate men in general and white men in particular, these girls could usually be relied on to toe the official line.
But one thing ZOG never did quite figure out was that not all white women were dumb broads, and that some of them had sense enough to see through the propaganda, to understand that white men weren’t their enemies, and to understand who really were their enemies. Some white women even proved it by joining the Party, and we were lucky enough to work two of them into the hiring positions at TopStaff. What this meant was that as long as it didn’t get too blatant, politically incorrect white males had at least some access to bottom rung employment, which is a situation ZOG definitely discouraged. It was essential to the continued operation of the system that any white male who resisted or whose mind was perceived to be incompletely under control be outcast, a pariah, consigned to the homeless shelters and the homeless encampments beneath the underpasses and in the parks and national forests. And eventually to prison, of course, when desperation and hopelessness pushed him over the edge. I don’t know what the hell I would have done if I hadn’t had Sherry Cahoon at TopStaff, who overlooked the glaring red flag with the “special pre-employment reference to U.S. Attorney General’s Human Relations Commission required” that popped on all my computer credit and background checks the agency ran. The Human Relations Commission was the government bureaucracy in charge of maintaining and enforcing the blacklist. Without Sherry I probably would have ended up collecting aluminum cans for recycling all day. She’s passed on now, but before that I used to see her at Old NVA Association reunions sometimes. One of her sons became the first commander of the Landfall colony on Mars, and one of her daughters became a well-known actress who specialized in female NVA Volunteer roles on Northwest TV. The daughter once claimed in an interview I read that she used her mom as a model. She had a good one.
Not that the pickings were all that great even with Sherry as a fairy godmother in my corner. The American economy had been mismanaged and looted by the Anglo-Zionists for almost a century, and the bill was finally coming due. The last few years of ZOG there was negative economic growth in America for the first time since the Jamestown colony’s first winter, and no one really knew what the real unemployment rate was because the government had classified the information as a national security secret. I do know that the year I graduated it was leaked into the media that non-governmental employers in the United States now employed more foreigners living outside the United States than American citizens. About all Sherry could do for me was place me as a warehouse mule at the Mighty Mart distribution center in Olympia. To be fair, that contract did pay ten dollars an hour, and that was about as good as anyone with my background was going to get under any circumstances.
I started at Mighty Mart the month after my graduation, when most of the guys in my class were rolling into various military installations on buses and getting their buzz cuts and getting kitted out for basic training. The job was simple: hump, hump, hump them trucks, stack them pallets, and do not let the word union so much as pass your lips or you’re out on your ear. Unload the trucks and toss that freight onto the conveyor, haul them pallets on a jack hither thither and yon. If you could drive a forklift that was twelve to fourteen bucks an hour, but those jobs were in the hands of the few actual direct Mighty Mart employees who worked in the warehouse. In some cases forklift jobs were actually handed down from father to son on the father’s retirement. Every forklift had a huge red, white, and blue Masonic dishrag sticker on it, of course. I did three shifts a week, twelve hours on and twelve hours off, which gave me 36 paid hours per week, four short of the necessary forty hours to give me the coveted full-time status and therefore entitlement to the few anemic benefits which the law required the temp agency to provide after working for them for a year. In the course of each twelve hour shift I got three ten-minute breaks and one half-hour lunch, the bare minimum required by law, and I had to clock out for them, so I was only paid for the eleven hour
s I actually humped. The work was hard, repetitive, mind-numbingly boring, and spirit-crushing. The warehouse was murderously hot in the summer when I started, and by the time I left to go on the bounce it was just starting to get bitter cold. Most of the foremen and team leads and most of my co-workers as well were Asian coolies who spoke no English, or else Mexicans who delighted in lording it over the gringos, a few kids like me who for one reason or another were 4-F for the army along with a scattering of broken, middle-aged drunks and sad sacks. Of course everyone was always stabbing each other in the back trying to get hired on permanent with the company, so you could at least get some very rudimentary benefits and a wee bit more job security than us temps had.
There was an upside, of course. The three days on, four days off schedule left me plenty of time for Party activity, and that summer the action was definitely picking up. I think we all understood that things as they were couldn’t last and that Amurrica was headed towards some kind of crunch. “I know that doom-saying right-wing cranks have been predicting imminent disaster since 1950, but I just get the feel that the whole ball of wax may finally be about to come apart,” Red Morehouse told the Chowder Society. “No society can stand the type of stress and strain that the empire has been subjected to for the past two generations. At some point a straw will come along that will break the camel’s back.” We kept on meeting, and although we’d lost a lot of kids to graduation and the army, we had some newcomers as well from Dundee High and the middle schools. I was still technically living at home, and I kicked in some of my pay to Mom and Dad to keep them in liquor and lower the static level about what was I going to do with my life, and don’t you dare go and do anything stupid like getting married to that redneck female whose white-trash family you’re always hanging out with. Yeah, right, they were the ones to talk. Well, that was Mom, mostly. Dad seemed pretty much past caring, he was so sick. But the vibes at home were sufficiently unpleasant so that I actually spent most of my time at the Wingfields’ house, often sleeping on their sofa overnight.
The Party evidently agreed with Red Morehouse’s assessment, or more likely he agreed with the Party’s assessment, because that summer we began to intensify preparation to go completely underground. Red was spending a lot of time up in Olympia and Seattle, and when he came back he gave us regular updates from the Political Bureau briefings he’d sat in on, including a few from the Old Man himself when he was in town, although that was rare since he was doing a lot of moving around in that eighteen-wheeler mobile command post. The thinking was that we would be formally outlawed under the Patriot Act within a year, which turned out to be an overly generous estimate. No one at that time anticipated what would happen on 10/22, but the assumption was that an incident of some kind would be created by ZOG and used as an excuse for the United States Attorney General to ban the Party and a number of our adjuncts and front groups as domestic terrorists or sympathizers thereof, and then conduct a general roundup and ship us all off to the concentration camps at Guantanamo Bay and out in the Nevada desert. The result was that there was a lot less spray-painting and leaflet-littering, and a lot more acquisition of property, vehicles, weapons, ammunition, canned goods, medical supplies, tools, maps and books and specialized computer and electronic gear. There was also an increase in revolutionary expropriations to pay for all these things, although our bunch in Lewis County was not involved in anything like that. So many people were getting desperate that another few robberies here and there barely made the papers. We were busy setting up safe houses and apartments, establishing codes and E & E procedures, setting up underground printing presses and computer servers, training ourselves in everything from field medic skills to woodcraft, acquiring vehicles and sets of false IDs, and drawing up lists and plans and blueprints on people and things in Lewis County that served ZOG and kept the Zoggish system in power. People and things to make go boom in the night.
I suppose I should also mention, briefly and reluctantly, that certain of our erstwhile “comrades” suddenly stopped coming around, and in some cases disappeared permanently. We had always assumed that we had informers in our midst and acted accordingly, insofar as it was possible to do so and still take care of business, but no revolutionary movement can function in an atmosphere of total paranoia and we simply had to get on with things. An informer must behave in a certain way or else they don’t fulfill their function, advocating illegal activity, spreading gossip and rumors, always trying to stick his nose into things that don’t concern him, you get the idea. With a little calm and rational observation it really wasn’t all that hard to weed them out early on, so long as we didn’t lose our cool and start seeing spies under every bed. The general rule was that unless and until we had some specific and concrete grounds for suspicion we took everyone at face value, and that actually worked pretty well. We didn’t speak about such things and I was never called upon to be involved in anything like that; it was done by specialists from Third Section. Also, to be clear on this, I need to mention that many years afterward I ran into a man who had vanished during that summer and whom I had always assumed was moldering away in a hole somewhere in the mountains. It turned out that the Party had ordered him to another part of the Homeland for a special job and that was where he ended up fighting his war. Did we get rid of all the government spies and agent provocateurs in our ranks? I regret to say, no. They were always there and they did damage right up to the last, sometimes terrible damage, but when the government that hires the informers is itself corrupt, confused, top-heavy with incompetent managers and quavering with senility, then a strong and vigorous movement of dedicated and disciplined rebels can still triumph. As we did.
That summer we also assembled and issued our hoarded arsenal of guns and ammunition, appointing reliable quartermasters and getting our weapons cleaned, zeroed, and distributed, which was a dangerous thing to do owing to the Schumer Act and more or less constituted our crossing of the Rubicon even before 10/22. Once we were caught passing out guns and ammunition and explosives that was pretty much all she wrote; the Feds would have had their excuse and we would have had to fight anyway. Contrary to present day misconceptions, the Schumer Act did not outright ban all private possession of firearms. The Second Amendment to the United States Constitution was never formally revoked, it was just nullified by six decades of legalistic salami-slicer techniques that sliced away Americans’ gun rights thin slice by thin slice, and by Federal courts on up to the Supreme Court itself that simply pretended the Second Amendment didn’t exist. The Schumer Act hedged private gun ownership around with so many restrictions that if you did have a gun you tripped over your own shoelaces every time you tried to use it or transport it and more often than not you had to turn it in just to insure your own legal safety.
Needless to say, any weapon heavy enough to be actually used in resisting tyranny was banned, including all semi-automatic longarms, called assault weapons, of all the moronic terms. A weapon by definition assaults people. Also any rifle capable of being fitted with a scope. (A “sniper’s rifle” they called those, which is almost as absurd. Any long gun a marksman uses is a sniper’s rifle. Did these people ever even think about some of the imbecilic terminology they used?) Your gun had to be ballistically fingerprinted with a test slug and a paper trail of ownership matched to the fingerprint maintained, which was the back door ZOG finally used to bring in nationwide registration. You couldn’t legally own more than twenty rounds of longarm ammunition and before you could buy another box of twenty you had to bring in twenty spent cartridge cases. You could not reload or own reloading equipment due to “safety considerations” in order to “protect the children.” (This from a régime that practiced kidnapping of young children for profit.) The gun had to have child safety locks, and in some localities they were electronically monitored so a signal went off at the local copshop if the lock was opened and so you had to call ahead of time and let the cops know why you were unlocking your gun. Your ammunition (all twenty rounds of it)
had to be stored in a stainless steel safe which was sometimes also programmed to alarm the police when it was opened, so forth and so on, blah blah blah ishkabibble. Not to mention the special local property taxes which cities and counties were encouraged to slap onto privately owned guns which made them more expensive to keep than your car. You had to have a written police permit which cost $25 a time to transport a weapon to and from a shooting range or hunting trip, etc., etc. The whole purpose of all this nonsense was to make gun ownership completely ineffective as a method of home defense, and so annoying and so risky—every year hundreds of white people slipped on some legal banana peel or other and went to prison on gun charges—that it simply wasn’t worth the hassle of owning one, so why not sell your guns to the police on a buy-back program and get some badly needed cash to pay those blood-sucking credit cards?
Like all good Southerners the Wingfields were gun lovers, and like millions of others they had been violating the thousands of state and Federal gun control laws since before I was born. So too had a number of native-born residents of Lewis County. We were always big hunters in the Northwest, and resistance to gun control laws was one of the few acts of mass civil disobedience whites ever engaged in. They didn’t have the balls actually to use the guns, but at least they kept them hidden away to take out now and then, stroke, and fantasize. It was the same problem that the government experienced when they tried to ban liquor during Prohibition and drugs later on. Guns are fun, and if something was fun, White Americans were going to do it. The fact is that despite a few heroic historic examples, during the War of Independence the NVA seldom had to raid police stations or military posts for weapons. Despite the draconian punishments, there were still an amazing number of guns around, as the Federal thugs from It Takes A Village found in Idaho on 10/22. All kinds of people had dozens of guns stashed away or hidden in closets. The problem with revolution in white America was never any lack of weapons or munitions; it was that white people had all the courage of rabbits. The Old Man always said that when we finally put some iron in our hearts, we’d have no trouble putting some iron in our hands. Nor did we.
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