“I’m from the government, and I’m here to help you!”
Unless you’ve lived in a cave in the wilderness for the past 30 years or so, you shouldn’t need to hear this, but the government does not give a fat rat’s ass about you, the normal law-abiding, property-owning, tax-paying citizen. But, for those of you who get all your information from the mainstream media and leftist political sound-bites (the same thing), here goes.
The government does not, will not, and will never “protect” you, the law-abiding citizen from anyone or anything.
The first time I was the victim of a crime was 30-some years ago. A local ne’r-do-well stoner kid, already without a license or car insurance, blew through a stop sign and T-boned me and my old '84 F-150 in Livingston, MT. After the crash, a lady who lived at the intersection came out of her house and said she had called 911. The kid in the passenger seat of the car that had hit me immediately jumped out of the vehicle, ran like a scalded dog, and disappeared.
The cops came and lackadaisically took a report. They already knew the kid who had hit me on a first-name basis. My truck was old even then, and at the time my insurance was through a “good neighbor” that told me that the uninsured motorist rider coverage which I had carried on my liability insurance for many years did not, for some reason incomprehensible to me, cover a collision caused by an uninsured motorist.
Eventually, I filed in civil court against the stoner dude for the damage to my truck. OF COURSE, the Park County Sheriff’s Office just could not, no matter how hard they tried, locate the individual to serve papers on him. Luckily, back then, I knew someone at said office. A couple of months later, that individual informed me stoner dude was back in jail for a different violation, so I called the SO again and they finally served the papers on him. One would think that an agency which gave a fat rat’s ass, did its job, or was remotely competent in any way would have checked for unserved papers on someone they booked into the jail. The Park County Sheriff’s Office did not check any of those boxes.
More months later, the trial eventually went to civil court. Stoner dude never showed for his court date. The judge ruled, “Yup, he owes you a truck. Good luck collecting on that. Next!”
As an aside, eventually stoner dude was back in jail for yet another different crime. A representative from a cruise line corporation came around to small-town jails and was offering to pay the fines to get such malcontents out of jail if they signed a contract to go to work for said cruise line for the next year. Jesus Christ! Not even the Marine Corps would even think about taking a “Go to war or go to jail” candidate by that time, but cruise lines were fine and dandy with such employees. That soured me on ever taking a cruise.
Many years later, in 2008, I was minding my own business, driving home in my newer F-150 in Granite County, MT, a little after 1800 on a weekday, when another local ne’r-do-well drunk driver swerved over the center-line and hit me head-on at highway speeds. As a defensive driver and CDL operator, when I came out of a creek-crossing dip on the state highway, I immediately saw a jacked-up orange ‘78 Blazer coming towards me, swerving wildly from shoulder to shoulder on the highway.
I locked up the brakes and managed to screech to a halt as far off on the right shoulder as I could get without rolling over. An instant later, he hit me on the RIGHT FRONT quarter as he swerved back up out of the ditch. I always wore a seatbelt and the truck had air bags. The impact jumped my half-ton Ford back about fifty feet. The windshield was cracked but intact, folded down and out of the cab on impact, and my hat and glasses wound up on the pavement fifty feet in front of the vehicle. My black lab Griz always rode with me in the cab but we had been duck hunting and he was all muddy so, for once, I made him ride in the truck bed. The braking threw him against the back of the cab. The impact hurled him out of the back of the truck, across both lanes of the highway and across the fence on the far side. Both he and I were, of course, fucked up for a very long time. Still, it was lucky that Griz had been in the back of the truck because the dashboard on the passenger side had been driven into the bench seat back.
The drunk driver, of course, just bounced through it and came out unscathed. He had been, the cops later said, traveling well in excess of 80 mph when he hit me. If I had not managed to see him coming and screech to a complete stop a moment before impact…When he managed to get his door open and fall out of the Blazer, a cascade of empty beer cans came out with him. It was 1800 on a weekday, he was three times over the legal limit for blood alcohol content, and this was his SEVENTH DUI. And of course, he had no license or insurance.
The drunk and I both got a helicopter ride to Missoula. By pure dumb luck, we wound up in the same hospital room, separated only by a curtain, and I could hear him drunkenly slurring to the State Troopers. “That fucker came out of nowhere and schmucked me!”
A couple of weeks later, when I was back home, I realized that neither the sheriff’s office nor the Highway Patrol had never even bothered to talk to me about the accident, so I called them. They assured me that they already knew the drunk driver on a first-name basis and that all evidence and tire marks proved without a doubt it was all his fault. At least this time I had Farm Bureau insurance and they covered all the hospital bills and damage with the uninsured motorist.
At the time I was a Pine Cone Piglet with the US Forest Circus so, in a county of not much more than 3,000 people, I knew all the deputies and first responders. Every one of them later expressed amazement that I ever lived through that wreck. Just three days after the wreck, one of the county dispatchers told me she had seen the drunk come out of the local convenience store with a case of beer under each arm, hop into his wife’s old Pinto, and drive away.
Other than the insurance, I never saw a dime from him. I never heard that he spent more than a night in jail. The county attorney at the time was a raging alcoholic whose former private practice specialized in getting his drinking buddies off of DUI charges. It later took a local judge coming out of retirement to get him disbarred after the county attorney himself ran over and nearly killed a teen-aged girl who was in the ditch at the time. My drunk either had a good lawyer, or the county attorney was one of his drinking buddies, but for some reason in my court case only four of his seven DUIs officially “counted”.
I was never the same after the wreck. I didn’t want to quit working, but eventually the Forest Circus talked me into disability retirement. I only asked for a seasonal summer employee to help me out, but they claimed they could not afford such an extravagant cost in the budget. A few years later, I found out the US Department of Aggravation had two full-time and one seasonal employee to replace me at the job I had been doing single-handedly, but no matter.
Eventually we moved back to Park County. Complications from the head-on collision included a Traumatic Brain Injury that eventually left me suffering from severe depression, extremely low testosterone, sleep issues, brain fog, memory issues, chronic fatigue, etc., etc. ad nauseum. I used to thrive on hard work, 10–12-hour days, and was a Marathon-level runner before the wreck. Now I can hardly get out of bed. Eventually, I became so dysfunctional, my wife of 16 years could not take it any longer and filed for divorce.
Well, that didn’t do my mental or physical well-being much good, of course. Back in Park County, after my wife left, I had to go through the local Internet provider for a modem up-date. The same guy I dealt with on that deal…I’ll call him Hadji…later independently contacted me about Internet security issues. Little did I know, he was an Internet scammer now operating either on his own or through some other scammer, when he re-contacted me and kept demanding more and more money to make sure my Internet was “secure”.
Eventually, after about five grand, I finally figured that out. I was getting almost daily phone demands and threats from him to “finish” securing me on-line. I contacted both the Federales and the Park County Sheriff’s office about him. Neither one of them, apparently, gave a shit. I filed a bunch of reports that they did nothing with. Park County just said, “Oh, it’s probably some foreign IP address and there’s absolutely nothing we can do.” I filed a bunch of reports with both the county and the Feds, and never heard anything back.
Weeks and months later, I was still getting threatening calls from Hadji, and told both the Sheriff and the Feds about it. I heard back…absolutely nothing. Ever. Again. Nada. Zilch, Zero. Zip. Which pretty much told me none of them had ever done a Goddamn thing about it.
Fast forward a year or two. My next-door neighbor, whom I will call Skippy Dippy, is a fucking asshole, a criminal and scoff-law. There is a public right-of-way access through his property to my home. Several years ago, he said he was installing cattle guards so he could graze his 9 horses and mules on his place. At the time, he insisted he was just putting the cattle guards in temporarily, on top of the ground, for the summer, and would remove them every fall so that I could plow and maintain the road (for him) with my tractor. The cattle guards were second-hand junk pieces of shit. They have not moved since, and are a huge pain in the ass to deal with in any way, shape, or form. They are a major obstacle to me either maintaining the road with the box blade on my tractor in summer, and an even bigger obstacle to me plowing snow with the straight blade and front-end loader in winter.
Eventually, I also had to install an electrified bump gate on my fence line just to keep his mules from jumping his improperly-installed, bent, twisted, gapped cattleguard and destroying my yard, open car port, and everything else. The bump gate is hard on vehicle finishes. Below me, his horses and mules kept hopping the cattleguard on the other side and getting into the other neighbor’s yard and buildings. Eventually, the feisty old ranch lady in her 80’s told him the next time his critters destroyed her yard and trees and shrubs, she was going to take the .30/30 to them.
So, Skippy Dippy added a second old, battered used junk cattleguard to her end of the property. He simply dug a hole in unsecured bare dirt and dropped the second cattleguard on top of the hole. Within a couple of years, this cattleguard had sunk into the ground several inches, creating a 7–8-inch vertical steel obstacle where it met the first half-assed cattleguard that merely lies on top of the ground.
It got so bad I started getting low tires on my car and truck from popping the bead to the rim going over the damn thing. Fed Ex and UPS began refusing to deliver to my residence because of it.
I had taken Skippy Dippy to task about it many times. I had offered the services of myself, my tractor and loader, and truck to help him fix it. Over and over, he swore he was going to “fix” it. He never did.
Finally, I attempted to contact the Park County Sheriff’s Department about getting him to fix the cattleguards. They did not answer their non-emergency line. They did not return emails. Eventually, I was down at the courthouse in Livingston, and I contacted the Sheriff’s Office in person. I was there to report for jury duty. If I had failed to respond to a jury summons, BTW, I would have been charged and jailed, of course. After waiting approximately 15-20, a sergeant finally wandered out into the hallway. I explained the situation to him and, of course, he said, “There’s absolutely nothing the Sheriff’s Office can do about someone obstructing a public right-of-way. Why don’t you talk to him? Handle it yourself.”
Note to self: The next time I talk to the SO, I will inform them that I am recording the conversation and record it. Ah, if only I had the “Handle it yourself” on tape. I would call for a load of cement and pave those fucked-up cattleguards flat.
A little bit more about Skippy Dippy. He is a dirty old bastard and a scofflaw. Many, MANY times the Sheriff’s Office, Montana Fish Wildlife and Parks game wardens, and Forest Circus Law Enforcement Officers have been out here trying to get ahold of him for various county, state, and Federal violations. They have asked me many times for information on him and I have always given them all the information I know and said I was willing to testify in court. They have, and always have done, ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.
Skippy Dippy is a former county road crew worker who was fired. The county, state and Feds have been after him for years for stealing gravel from the county, for outfitting without a license, for illegally cutting trails on public and Federal land, for poaching, and who knows what else. Supposedly, one year the vehicles they used for illegal outfitting got snowed in up an access in the Crazy Mountains and “someone” hot-wired the county road grader that was parked down below on a county road and plowed them out, running over numerous electrical boxes in the process. Rumor had it he was also in trouble with the state and Federal tax people. After that rumor surfaced, I checked the Montana Cadastral and lo and behold the two parcels of land which had been in his name for many, many years were suddenly “owned” by his daughter and son-in-law in North Dakota, although their address on the Cadastral just happened to be Skippy Dippy’s local PO box. That same year, his two running 1-ton dually pickup trucks (out of about 10 non-runners) which had always worn Montana personalized license plates, were suddenly wearing North Dakota plates.
When law enforcement comes to talk to him, they always come in pairs, separate official rigs and uniforms, deputy and game warden or game warden and Forest Service LEO. But they are apparently terrified of him, because they just sit out at his closed gate and yell at the house/shack/hovel from 150 yards away. He never responds. They never do anything. One time, I told the chickenshit bastards with the body armor and AR-15s that if they wanted me to go knock on his damn door for them, I would. They, of course, declined. Before I knew what a POS Skippy Dippy was, trying to be a good neighbor I attempted to help him sight in his rifle (you cannot sight in a 7mm Rem Mag with 3-4 different brands of ammo and 2-3 different bullet weights of assorted ammunition used interchangeably and kept at random in a plastic bag, BTW) and hunt antelope. When he is shooting, the safest place to be is right in front of the intended target.
So, the point is, government and law enforcement won’t do jack fucking shit for the law-abiding, voting, property-owning, tax-paying citizen when he or she is the victim of actual crimes and criminals. Oh, they’ll gladly sock the shit out of you for victimless “crimes” like speeding, or a parking violation, or not wearing your seatbelt, because this generates more revenue (taxation without representation) for the state. BTW, I have never been cited for any such violations, but I still have to live in fear of them.
But if you, dear reader, are the actual victim of an actual crime, government does not give a fat rat’s ass, will not help or protect you in any way, even attempt to see that you are compensated, and could care less. Makes me wonder what I’m actually getting for the sky-rocketing property taxes I have to pay every year on a property I own free and clear.
As retired Forest Circus, I can tell you for a fact that the very last thing our “public servants” give a shit about is anything even remotely related to serving the public. It comes as no surprise to me that someone who has been arrested 72 times is still out and about on the streets and willing and able to douse with gas and set on fire a random woman on public transit out east. Not even in Montana does the law do jack shit to protect you from anything.
Tell me again what we’re paying all these endless taxes for.
