Our day in Detroit (and Canada!)
DETROIT, MI – On Monday morning Ryan, Pete and I woke up in MARV which was parked on a Starbucks parking lot outside Detroit. We were able to drowsily walk inside and work for a good part of the day until we met up with Paul Kersey of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy at 2PM. He was generous enough to dedicate most of his day to give us a tour of government destruction in Detroit. Paul made the direct connection between failed policies by the Detroit government and the economic conditions residents are saddled with as a result. We toured the city until 3:20 p.m. when we made a wrong turn.
Thanks to the GPS Paul brought (that was not updated to recent construction changes), we ended up taking an exit toward Canada with no possible way to turn around. We were Canada bound and if you’re a regular reader of the Motorhome Diaries you know that this would be bad news. We made the drive over the Ambassador Bridge hoping that we could simply tell the militant Canadian crossing guards that we’d like to turn around and have no desire to enter their country. We had a tour of Detroit to get back to and this shouldn’t have taken more than 30 minutes.
Shouldn’t have.
On the other side of the bridge we got into a queue of vehicles and passengers who were to be asked invasive questions by government agents. We stated our desire to turn around and were told where to park. Pete covered the events thoroughly here but we were stopped, frisked, MARV was searched inside which included the use of two dogs. One dog was for drugs which found nothing. The other dog was for currency and when we were told it found something we were all excited only to be disappointed that it was a false alert. We were then told to wait to talk to a border bureaucrat in a sealed lobby. She had papers for us to sign stating that we “hereby voluntarily withdraw my application to enter Canada and agree to leave Canada without delay.” It was misleading because we didn’t apply to enter Canada – we took a wrong turn. Wanting to make it to the 7 p.m. meetup I signed the bureaucrats form, as did Paul. Pete refused, like he had during our previous encounter with the Canadian border thugs. Ryan had a different approach, making him my hero:
Because of Pete’s refusal and Ryan’s subversion, the border bureaucrat stated “I’m glad you guys think this is funny” and told us to wait in the sealed off waiting room. She said that they are there 24 hours and that this would delay our exit. Pete’s philosophy was that the longer they held us the worse they would look. I just wanted a stiff drink at the quickly approaching meetup. We sat around for about 20 minutes until a border agent over the intercom told us to walk out to our vehicle. We were told we could leave and we were on our way back to Detroit.
That is until we drove the few feet into the U.S. border checkpoint where the new armed gang calling themselves “the Department of Homeland Security” searched our vehicle all over again and detained us. They also deleted the video we took for our documentary because as one of the crossing guards said, he didn’t want to end up on YouTube. Despite rhetoric, government doesn’t want transparency because if people knew what their government was up to they wouldn’t stand for it. We were asked plenty of questions by a heavily armed, t-shirt wearing DHS gang and after another hour of detention rooms, questioning, and a vehicle search, we were given a stamped note and were told we could leave.
The entire encounter with these two gangs took five hours making us cancel the rest of our tour and making us about an hour late for our Detroit meetup.
And what a meetup it was. I like to boast that the Motorhome Diaries would not be possible without the help of others. Pete and I are not wealthy, nor do we have perfect knowledge so last night was a fantastic example of how others make MHD better. It also provides a contrast between the kindness of the voluntary society we are engaged in and the violence inherent in the institution of government. We arrived nearly an hour late and the basement of Kurt’s place was full of freedom-loving folks. We met a lot of great new people and got to see Matt & Janet who were two of the organizers of the Liberty Summer Seminar that our previous border skirmish forced us to miss.
Also in attendance were Jason Osborne and John Shaw of Think Twice News. Osborne gave me the footage of my interview with Judge Andrew Napolitano and a handful of cash to spend on gas to keep us rolling. Kurt, our host, and his wife provided a lot of food and drinks. Additionally they set out a bowl and a sign asking for donations. At the end of the evening there was $100 in there which was spent on gas this morning to get us to Lansing and beyond. After the day we had, the kindness of our new and old friends reminded us why we are doing this. I want to live in a world without aggression perpetrated in my name by a criminal gang calling itself government. I want to live a moral life and can’t do that when money is taken from me to fund violence.
And I’m not alone. The after party went on until two in the morning and I noticed that I was surrounded by fellow evolutionaries who seek voluntaryist approaches to promoting peace and ending state violence. I went to bed inspired.
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