Convicted!

So we lost.

We had debated for months over whether to represent ourselves or to use our court appointed attorneys. At first, I expected to go pro se, partly because I only met Bryon Collins on the day before the trial was scheduled to start in August. John had initially expected to let Justin Tapp represent him, but in the weeks approaching our new, February court date had strongly advocated for self-representation. That was fine with me, and for the same reasons – Christ promised that when called before courts, we, not our lawyers, will be given the words to say.

    “When you are brought before synagogues, rulers and authorities, do not worry about how you will defend yourselves or what you will say, for the Holy Spirit will teach you at that time what you should say.”

    (Luke 12:11-12)

Mistakes were made, but overall I was pleased with our conduct. We three prayed together on every break in the court proceedings, and I’d rather go through a trial like that than with the most experienced barristers that have every argued in Old Bailey.

Continue reading “Convicted!”

Winter Protest

Yesterday we were back in court for oral arguments on the pre-trial motions. Judge Motyka ended the hearing by saying that he’d take it under advisement and rule in two to three weeks. I’d spent Friday afternoon with a sign on Town Square, but haven’t been back this week.

What, then, is Occupy? What are we trying to achieve?

Definition of revolution

Occupy is a revolution. Occupy seeks to achieve an anti-capitalist revolution in the United States.

Christian Revolution

It has to be a Christian Revolution, though. Only God can lead an opposition against a government determined to use S.W.A.T. teams to break up grassroots street demonstrations. It’s not enough to be against something, either. We have to state what we’re for.

First and foremost, Godly leadership. Governors, legislators, executives, business owners, men and women who kneel before God and seek to know and do his will. Everyone, ideally, should become a disciple of Christ! I’d love to see a world where every man, woman, and child commits their lives wholeheartedly to God. Failing that, at least the leadership should be Godly.

You can not serve God and money

I’d like to provide free housing, free food, free energy, free transportation, free technology, free education. Why?

Luke 6:30

I can’t do it myself! I want to live in a society where people choose to give all of these things voluntarily. How do we pay for it all? Not through taxes! Not through borrowing! Only by voluntary charity, by gifting our time, our money, our resources. That’s a big change from what we’ve got now. That’s a revolution!

…and if the United States won’t go for it?

Alaskan Independance

How do we achieve this? By bringing 100,000 people up here from down south and wining the 2014 election.

Occupy Alaska

The next step is to win this court case. I want to obtain a court order prohibiting the police from evicting political demonstrators from Town Square, then build up an opposition camp that can’t be ignored by the media, and start pitching a simple line:

“Come to Alaska. Come to Alaska. We’re occupying Alaska. Just come to Alaska.”

Campfire

Anchorage’s laws are not reasonable, but their firemen (eventually) are.

The “TL;DW” (too long; didn’t watch) summary:

  1. The Anchorage Assembly has passed laws to ensure safe fires.
  2. There is no objective standard for what constitutes a safe fire.
  3. The only standard is that fires must be in approved containers.
  4. The only approved containers are corporate products.
  5. Someone made an anonymous report of an “illegal” fire.
  6. This group of firemen eventually used a reasonable standard to determine that this fire was, in fact, safe, even though it was not in an approved container.

Delay!

We went to trial last week and the verdict was… a delay!

Actually, we didn’t get close to a verdict. We didn’t even make it to jury selection.

Scott Christiansen was there, and wrote a nice piece for the Anchorage Press that presents a nice, balanced view of what happened in court last Tuesday morning:

Protesting or Squatting?

For my own part, I’ve been busily preparing for the trial, and have neglected other duties, like updating this blog. I’ll make up for it by replacing freesoft.org’s lead video, which will eventually be called “Defense Exhibit A”, with “Defense Exhibit B”, an hour-long review of what happened to Occupy two years ago:

Testimony 43

I was raised in a Christian home, by my mother who was active in church life and took me to the local Lutheran church almost every Sunday. I well remember Sunday school, confirmation, Luther League. We learned all the basic Bible stories. What I don’t remember well are doctrinal issues, or any deep discussions on discipleship or religious vocation. It seemed that you could live a comfortable life in a suburban community with no deep crises of faith, and I accepted this at face value. I’m sure it helped that my parents enjoyed a solid marriage, had no problems with drugs or alcohol, and provided me with a middle class lifestyle – a house, a computer, a car when I turned 16. I did well in school, though I didn’t particularly care if my grades were exceptional. My academics were good enough to get me accepted to MIT, although I chose to go to Maryland instead. Who cared if Bill Rivers got straight A’s and was valedictorian?

I went to college; my parents paid the bill. I studied physics, learned it reasonably well, and finally dropped out because I had a decent job working with the burgeoning Internet technology. At this time I wasn’t a regular church goer, didn’t join YWAM, and never considered for one minute going off on a mission trip to Africa.

I did work with free software.

I learned everything I could about Unix. I was an early adopter of Linux and it became my operating system of choice by the time I was 23. I dabbled on one software coding project after another, and founded a website (freesoft.org) that I still operate today. I attached no profound religious significance to this at the time, but by the time I left college I had found a career path. I wanted to write software and publish it for free on the Internet.

Something was lacking, however, and it wasn’t just the money I couldn’t make giving everything away for free. I didn’t know what it was. I decided to ride a bicycle across the country. Why? Who knows? My father asked me what I was trying to prove, and I had no answer. I wasn’t trying to prove anything! I know now that I was being led by the Holy Spirit, and at the end of that trip from New Jersey to Arizona I had one of the most profound spiritual experiences of my life.

I had a revelation from God! “Your problem is that you’re trying to do everything yourself and not relying on me.” I responded by giving away the bike and everything else and started to walk through the Arizona mesa. I wish I could say that I kept walking. Instead, I wrote the following in Bicycling across America:

I was afraid that if I kept walking, I was afraid I would find my calling, and I was afraid of knowing what it might be…

That day, I broke down. I got money wired to me and was on a bus by that evening. I had discovered that a part of me, much stronger that I thought, wanted nothing to do with grand visions of any kind. I wanted my family and friends, didn’t want to be rich, but didn’t want to be poor, wanted to write software, play music, cook nice meals and certainly not wonder all over the country.

I returned to a somewhat conventional life, though I must say that I felt deeply unfulfilled. I could never find a place to fit in. I lived in Mexico for a year, spent a summer at a religious community I had visited on the bike trip, worked on various odd computer projects, most notably assembling some essays into Connected: An Internet Encyclopedia.

Within four years I had reached a crisis. It came one evening in the spring of 1997, when I heard a knock at the door of the friend’s house where I was couch surfing. I opened the door to be faced with a dozen armed police officers executing a search warrant on my friend, who was also a small time drug dealer.

There were now no two ways about it. The raid pushed me over some kind of internal ledge. I was enraged at the society I lived in, that left me homeless because I didn’t make money on free software and declared war against its own people because of what they smoked. The choice was either to act out against the government or to let it go. Should I blockade the capital’s subway system to force the government to end the drug war? Instead, I turned to God, prayed, fasted, and was baptized in a lake in Ohio. I was 27 years old.

Looking back now, it was one of the most decisive events of my life. Given the choice of doing things my way or God’s way, I chose God’s way. I can’t always figure that out. I don’t always get it right. I neglect my prayer life. I wander off on my own. Yet the intent has been clear since that Sunday morning in 1997.

Within a few more years I had moved back to my parent’s home and spent most of my thirties there, studying mathematics. I still enjoy math, and I still hope to achieve significant results in that field, but by the time I turned forty I knew that math wasn’t it. I was still deeply dissatisfied with the progress of my life. Perhaps God was dissatisfied, too. I think he expects something other than solving Schrodinger’s equation.

So I set to work finishing a novel that I had been working on for years, a tale of anger and of love, of redemption and of revolution. The hero steals billions of dollars to fund his private dream of being the first man to walk on Mars, but that plan only leads to disaster. He changes, and embraces Christ. Think of it as Moby Dick, in space, and Ahab starts listening to Starbuck halfway through.

Another theme worked its way into my book, that of revolution! By the time Captain Mercuriou returns to Earth, he’s proposing Hawaiian secession and independence instead of flying to Mars as a more viable solution to our problems of populism, greed, and violence. I didn’t plan it that way. I did pray regularly as I was writing, and have finally concluded that it was God who gave me the ending to Icarus’ Wing.

Since I was proposing Hawaiian secession in my novel, it made sense to actually move to Hawaii, and that I did in late 2010. Actually, I wasn’t sure if Hawaii or Alaska was the better choice for a Christian revolution, but I decided to start with Hawaii. I was at least able to better work some Hawaiian setting into my novel by actually going there.

I lived on the North Shore of Oahu for eight months, made good progress on the novel, but didn’t quite finish it. As I was running out of money, I turned to the local Christian community for help. It’s still a bitter memory. One minister suggested that I get a job. I told him that I was writing a book. He thought for a second, then asked “How much money does it make?” That was his only question about Icarus’ Wing. He didn’t ask why I was writing it; nothing about my relationship with God; didn’t ask to read what I had written. He preaches to the youth.

After Hawaii, God led me to Alaska, to Occupy, to 2012. It’s a story I’ve told in My Confession. Occupy should have become the great Christian political opposition of 2012. Instead, it collapsed into street riots because nobody stood up to lead it. Instead of going to Anchorage, where God had guided me, I went to Fairbanks and spent a fatal month there, occupying instead of preaching, and talking in a General Assembly instead of making speeches on the street corner.

America has turned away from God, abandoned Gospel obedience in favor of freedom, and developed a cynical philosophy of leadership based on economic and military domination of anyone who opposes “the majority”. Between the people who really believe in this, and the people who just keep working their jobs and voting for the corporate candidates, they are the majority.

I am now more convinced than ever that an Alaska Revolution is ordained by God. The plan is simple. Convince a quarter million Christians to pack up, move to Alaska, and become the majority in this state. The hard part is getting the media coverage necessary to convey that plan to the nation. It’s impossible, really. Only God can truly lead this revolution.

My prayer dialog currently goes like this. Please God, I can not bear this sorrow. Please Father God, either kill me or revive this opposition. I can not bear this sorrow, God, I can not bear this sorrow. Let me take my own life, give me permission and means to take my own life. Thy will be done. Thy will be done. Please God, please God, I can not bear this sorrow, I can not bear this sorrow…

My direction is forward, despite failure, despite hardship, despite hopelessness and despair. “Finish what you’ve started.” By the grace of God, and through no power of my own, I will.

Philosophy of Christian Education

I write from the perspective of a teacher, one who has taught principally adults, sometimes adolescents, and never children. I write from this perspective while remaining aware that the ultimate responsibility for the education of children lies with their parents, aware also of the passions aroused in parents whenever issues of child rearing are discussed.

I will note only in passing those unfortunate and, unfortunately, too common, occurrences when parents dispute and disagree, perhaps even to the point of divorce. Family, teachers, schools and courts are then placed into the unwanted but unavoidable position of arbitrating between father and mother to determine what is best for their children. Instead, for this essay, I will limit myself to those happy cases where the parents agree on the educational course of their children, and further agree that a Christian education is desired.

It does not follow that the students must be Christians.

Especially in primary and secondary school, the parent, not the student, is likely the driving force behind the enrollment. Furthermore, adolescents are transitioning to adulthood, and not only may be asking philosophical questions about the existence and nature of God, but are also making more assertive and independent behavioral choices.

…Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have…

1 Peter 3:15

So the Christian teacher, as St. Peter advises disciples in general, should be prepared to give answers to questions of faith, in addition to whatever the lesson plan happens to be for the day.

Granted, then, that the teacher is a Christian with a personal relationship with God and a personal testimony that is compatible with the parent’s expectations, how then, to prepare students in a Christian school? What, first and foremost, is the goal?

Jesus came to them and spoke to them, saying, “All authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth. Go, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things that I commanded you. Behold, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”

Matthew 28:18-20

Thus, the ideal teacher is not only a Christian, but a disciple, because it is for discipleship that we seek to prepare our youth.

A disciple may not be a professional teacher. A disciple could only be a professional teacher if called predominately to that vocation by God, and none of the great historical disciples were. Neither Moses, nor David, neither Peter nor Paul, not Benedict, not Francis… none of them were professional teachers. Perhaps Martin Luther came as close to a teaching vocation as any great Christian disciple, but I still argue that Luther’s role as a theology professor at Wittenberg was secondary to his greater calling in life.

So, the ideal Christian teacher is a disciple first, and a teacher second. One could argue that the ideal Christian teacher would be both, but that would relegate everyone on the previous paragraph’s list, from Moses to Francis, to secondary status. Perhaps we could use them as subs.

I do not claim that there are no disciples called to serve as professional teachers. I merely point out that many are not, and because our primary goal is to train the youth as disciples, a disciple, even if not a professional teacher, is preferable to someone who has been teaching calculus for twenty years but has no real sense of being guided by the Holy Spirit. I further contend that your “average” Christian disciple (whatever that may be) will have a greater calling in life than simply teaching mathematics.

So, the ideal Christian teacher is a disciple in the strongest possible sense, possesses a mastery of the subject material being taught, is capable of teaching both discipleship and the subject at hand, and whose views on questions of morals and dogma are compatible with those of the parents, who bear the ultimate responsibility for the upbringing of their children.

Adolescents, “vacillating between infancy and youth” (Octavio Paz), are fully capable of leaving home, getting a job, or just living homeless on the streets. Yet their parents continue to support them, provide them with shelter and nourishment, arrange for their continuing education, and the adolescents generally accept this arrangement. Why? Life, in its brutality and its beauty, in its love and its violence, in its glorious success and its crushing failure, is, for them, yet something that mostly passes by on the television screen.

“I’m dropping you off in downtown L.A. with no money and just the clothes you’re wearing, son. If you need food or shelter, pray to God. He provided for Haggar in the desert.” (Genesis 21)

For better or for worse, few parents are prepared to make this offer and few adolescents are prepared to accept it. Perhaps it’s better, after all, for the adolescent to wait a few more years, perhaps until their early twenties, before deciding whether to take Jesus up on his offer to sell all of your worldly possessions, give your money to the poor, and become a disciple of Christ (Luke 12).

In the mean time, those of us who have made that choice wish to present it as what it is: the most important decision of any human being’s life. We do not wish to neglect discussing it, nor do we wish to sugar coat its consequences. Neither silence nor spin is acceptable. Of what do we wish to inform adolescents?

A ground study of the Bible is essential. Those of us raised on the stories of Abraham and Moses, of Ezekiel and Elijah, of Jesus and Peter might tend to take this for granted. Everyone knows the Bible stories, right? Well, not everyone, at least not until the stories are told, and without a sense of where you’ve come from, how can you develop a sense of where you are?

Some knowledge of post-Biblical Christian history is important, too. It’s been two thousand years since the last of the scriptural texts were written, and a lot has transpired here on planet Earth. While nothing should supplant the teachings of the Messiah as authoritative truth, young Christians should know something of how the church has evolved over the centuries, of Benedict and Francis, of Martin Luther and of Mother Teresa. The schisms of those years must be mentioned too, at least so as to understand the Aryan controversy or the Church of Later Day Saints.

These topics can be handled, perhaps are best handled, in the context of Sunday School or religion classes. Yet it seems counter productive to present spirituality as a specialized discipline, something as unexpected from the history teacher as a lecture on photosynthesis. That would present Christianity as a career choice, rather than as a life choice. So for practical guidance on how to live a Christian life, as well as creating a school environment where Christian virtue is displayed, the entire faculty should be Christians, and Holy Spirit should move in their lives.

To achieve this, perhaps it’s best to regard Christian education as a ministry, and the Christian school as a mission. From this perspective, the students are junior disciples in a Christian community, a community that should take time to pray and worship together, to seek God’s will, both individually and collectively, as well as developing private prayer, personal discernment, and spiritual guidance. Worship services, fellowship, prayer retreats, mission trips and evangelism seem not only to be good ideas, but essential components. Ideally, a Christian school should be but one ministry within a fully developed Christian community, so that the students may witness and learn from fully developed and functional discipleship.

Discipleship. Mission. Community. An overriding sense that God must be in charge. These are the guiding concepts of Christian education, just as they guide Christian life.

Arraignment

I made my second court appearance today. John and Margie came with me, even though it was only an arraignment. I pled not guilty, asked for a public defender to assist me, and was given a date in late July for a pretrial conference.

I then walked down the hall to a different courtroom where an actual pretrial conference was underway. Looks like I can expect a trial date in late August.

John and Margie have earlier trial dates, probably because they actually spent several days in jail before John’s mom paid his bail and Margie got her conditions of release modified to let her return to Town Square.

We haven’t actually returned to Town Square, at least not for a 24-hour sit-in. We’re meeting with our lawyers in two days, and I want to discuss getting a court order prohibiting the city from arresting political demonstrators for trespassing.

We’re also preparing flyers to hand out, describing our plans and goals. Ideally, a trial in two months would lead to a renewed occupation, with a court order in hand to prevent further arrests. If the flyers are successful, maybe we’ll have thirty people by then. Maybe we’ll have three hundred!

An incident later in the afternoon underscored why I’m determined to stage a revolution. The three of us were relaxing in Delany Park when two police officers on bicycles pulled up and told me to unplug my cellphone from the outlet, which was only for park employees and permit holders. “It’s called theft of services”, he said.

I complied and later complained to the city ombudsman, but there are so few places where I can use electricity that working on the website, porting Macaulay 2 to Android, or writing on this blog requires real ingenuity. I’m developing Android applications which I publish for free on the Internet, but I can’t keep the phone charged to do it.

I’m done! Done! DONE with this leadership! Christians are so PERSECUTED in this country!

No more! No more of this! Please, father God, no more of this! I can’t even work on my website, the hatred, the hatred, oh God, no more of this, please God, no more of this.

Almost every morning and every night now, I beg God to either restore this revolution or take my life. We’re supposed to love each other, and all I have in me is hatred, hatred, hatred for this majority.

What is the plan? We convince three hundred thousand people to pack up, move to Alaska, and BECOME the majority.

Day 11

Night 11 found the site unoccupied for the first time, with me sleeping at my campsite and John and Margie in jail.

I got a late start to Day 11, slept in until 9, spent an hour at church drinking coffee, and didn’t get to the site until almost two. I wanted to get there earlier, but everyone who knows me well knows that I’m notoriously unpunctual. It also took me a while to decide on a course of action.

I sat on the sidewalk, in compliance with the trespass order, but I entered the park to preach, and I intend to preach every hour, on the hour. I preached at two o’clock, on the dot. I want everyone to know what has happened to John, and I am absolutely screaming for revolution against this indifferent majority and their tyrannical democracy.

I’m also calling on people to occupy Town Square.

I preached again at three, and at four, and at five.

After my five o’clock sermon, a friend stopped by, the man who donated the sleeping bag on Night 1, and I went to his apartment for my first shower in two weeks. We worked on some math for a while, then he gave me another sleeping bag (a prayer answered!) and drove me back around nine o’clock. I went to bed at John’s campsite, which is a lot closer to downtown than mine.