I host a weekly discussion group on the Telegram platform that I call, “Friday Night Militia Talk”. The purpose is to share and troubleshoot local militia development questions, triumphs, and troubles. (If you are interested in participating, send me an e-mail to securetheserights@protonmail.com, and I will send you an invitation link, and put you on a reminder/cancellation/ notification list for the event)

People show up from all over the country, and their personal and local situations vary as widely as their geography. Some are part of established groups, some are wishful loners, some are old and some young, some have been aware of or involved with Tactical Civics for many years, and some are just finding out what it is about.

Some times I have a specific subject that I think is worth telling everyone about, but I always make room for participants to share their specific concerns and ideas.

Last night a participant contributed his concern about potential confiscation of stored food, and his advice to bury or otherwise hide some.

Having a stockpile of all the essentials must be a part of everyone’s prudent planning, whether you are planning as an individual, as a family, a MAG, tactical group, a CERT, or a fully-organized militia. Depending on uninterrrupted just-in-time supply of everything, is living in la-la-land…. and asking to be a helpless dependent, or a corpse.

And confiscation of property by lawless agents, whether free-lance robbers, hungry armies passing through, or your own government fighting “hoarding” and promising “equitable distribution”, has been a recurring theme throughout history. And, in response, so have been innumerable variations of hiding, caching, et cetera.

We briefly discussed some of the practical aspects of hiding stuff. How to preserve it; the inconvenience of accessing it, particularly without being observed; the need to access it frequently to rotate your stock and prevent both depletion and spoilage.

But every discussion of countermeasures against tyranny or lawlessness MUST include a, “Wait! We are Americans!” moment.

For most of human history, every concentration of power, whether a gang of brigands, a barbaric invader, or often and especially your own king or other superficially legitimate government, was a potential, indeed probable, threat to our property and our lives. That’s just the way it was. These powerful groups often operated like the classic Mafia “protection racket”, in which you were made to buy your security against some threat, often created by the very guys promising the “protection”.

We had to play. it was the only game in town.

Not that there were not wise people and strong communities scattered thickly through history that saw through this abomination, and took more-or-less effective measures to counteract it.

But it was not until the founding of our own country that a whole society was organized on the principle of mutual defense, that we created an explicit framework of cooperation, to “SECURE OUR RIGHTS”. We declared in 1776 that this is the sole legitimating purpose of the cooperative political frame-works we call, “government”. We designed a government that could be effective, but not strong enough to follow the immemorial pattern of tyranny……but the most crucial part of that design was our own collective determination to maintain autonomous local defense, according to a thousand-year-old common-law pattern, that reached a new height of acceptance and consistency in our colonial period, AKA Militia. And that is the part that we have, now for generations, catastrophically neglected.

Should we store food? Of course! Should we hide some of it, and of other necessities? As part of an integrated plan, yes. But should we live as if our only security is to scurry in the dark like mice hiding seeds, hoping to avoid the notice of inevitable predators? NO!!

This is OUR Country, these are OUR homes and communities, ours to enjoy, ours to prosper, ours to DEFEND.

Not to defend by deceit, or in doubtful-to-hopeless last ditch battles, but by the sober, diligent, vigorous, lifelong process of organizing and planning with our neighbors, building capabilities and relationships not only with each other and with nearby and far-away like-minded groups, but with our servants/the officers of our institutional government .

It’s called Constitutional Militia!