I think one of the weirdest people to ever live is those who consider themselves sovereign citizens. They refuse to accept the government and refuse to obey the laws of the land because they consider themselves above it. And as a result, they don’t pay taxes, they don’t pay their bills, and anything at all that seems to be an obligation on their part, they’ll most likely not do it.
These people can be really funny because they refuse to recognize the police for who they are. They would fight them when they come to carry out their duties, they’ll try to claim rights and expect everyone to just go with the flow. And when that obviously fails, it’ll look as if the system is targeting them specifically.
However, the funny thing here is that these so-called sovereign citizens aren’t fully sovereign. They use the facilities that other taxpayers funded. They refuse to pay power bills, but they want access to steady power. They want clean water but refuse to pay for it. The roads they use are built by the government, and even the hospitals they go to when they’re sick are also fully funded by the government.
And even worse, they refuse to acknowledge the police as a form of authority. Yet, when they’re in trouble, they’ll call the police. When there is a fire, they’ll call for the fire department. These guys refuse to acknowledge them, but they have no qualms calling them to do their jobs when they want it. That’s just a crazy scenario for me.
What’s making me say this? I watched a clip on Facebook not too long ago. It was about a weird family that was quite large. However, they had an incestuous relationship with each other, and as a result, some of them were disabled in one form or the other. And to that, the government always sent disability cheques to the family, helping them to cope.
But you see, all the members of this family also saw themselves as sovereign citizens. They refused to follow the law when it told them that incest was illegal and taboo, they caused havoc in town, disturbing the residents, and even gave the police trouble. Whenever they were arrested, they’d simply remain in jail until they had to leave because of one thing or the other. In a nutshell, they were trouble.
Eventually, the government took action. After all, these guys were living entirely on the government, yet they refused to recognize the same government that was paying them. They didn’t pay power bills, sanitation bills, or even water bills. They only used and used. They took and took. It was insane. The only way the government could deal with them was to withhold the disability cheques. And that sparked off a protest because apparently, they had a ‘right’ to that money.
It’ll never stop being funny when people fail to recognize you for what you are but only what you can give, which is clearly the case here. The other day, a story was trending online about a stepfather being told that he couldn’t correct or do any fatherly duties towards his step-children. He only needed to pay their fees and provide money when they needed it. Everything else was to be handled by the biological father, who wasn’t actively present in the lives of the children anyway. How’s this any different? You don’t want people telling you what to do, but you want them to be bankrolling your lifestyle. Like, how exactly does this jell?
Well, these are just my thoughts on this. I don’t know fully what being a sovereign citizen entails, and the dangers it could pose to a nation. However, so far, the depictions I’ve been seeing are not really inspiring. Maybe from time to time, we’d come across such people. And when we do… uhm… I don’t really know what we should do at that point.
I guess only time will tell.
Thank you for reading. Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below, I would love to know what you’re thinking. Till we meet in the next post.
N.B: All images used in this post are mine. The thumbnail was designed using Canva.
