The Scofflaw Demographic

By Christian Probasco, 2-21-07

According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, “scofflaw” was “the winning entry in a national contest during Prohibition to coin a word characterizing a person who drinks illegally.” The American Heritage Dictionary now defines it as “One who habitually violates the law or fails to answer court summonses.” I think the term might be applied in a new sense to a goodly portion of the outdoor recreation crowd.

In the cities, our “freedoms” come with conditions.  We travel where we choose, provided we have the proper papers and identification, so long as the police don’t have a problem with our skin color, accent or attitude toward them. When we speak truth to power we can expect our government to surveil our e-mail and activities. Each of us is allowed the liberty of deciding how we make profits for other people. We are allowed to bear arms as long as they can be traced to us, so they can be taken from us at the discretion of the authorities.  We imbibe whatever recreational substances make money for the people buying off our politicians.  We construct or modify our own homes as we like so long as we secure the necessary permits, and so long as our plans don’t clash with the home owner association’s rules. 

We have God-given rights, in other words, until some power far lower in the hierarchy than God, or even the pope, nixes them.

Some people accept this set of circumstances and some have a problem adjusting to it. Members of the second group are the same who tend to stare out office windows, if they have them, dreaming of a better place or better job.  Trapped in the city, they are statistically more likely to engage in extramarital affairs, embezzle money from employers or involve themselves in other white-collar crimes, call in sick, quit jobs without notice, tell bosses off, gamble, play video games all night, smoke, overcharge credit cards, run red lights, drive too fast, park in no-parking zones, ignore parking tickets, fail to report incomes and assets to the IRS, and take illegal recreational drugs. 

Many don’t have any idea what’s wrong with them.  Doctors will label them with any number of mental pathologies but none will quite fit the symptoms
A few of them, by choice or good fortune, will at some point find themselves far from the city, in a real wilderness, by which I don’t necessarily mean a “wilderness area.” They will discover the asterisks appended to the above rights mostly stripped away.  For the first time in their lives, they will be free to do as they please.  It may dawn on them then that they are suffering from a genetic condition.  Some of their ancestors were subjected to a selection process along a frontier, which favored individuals who could get by on their own initiative, without the adult supervision we take for granted in our metropolises.

Increasingly, they will find excuses to get back into the wild.  They will take up fishing or hunting, hiking, backpacking, four-wheeling, gold prospecting, outdoor photography--whatever does the trick of returning them to the place which makes them feel like human beings.

The danger for them is that over time, and many journeys far from the madding crowd, where there is nobody to tell them what to buy, what to think, what to do and when to do it and how much effort to put into it, those souls may begin to realize what little need they have for bosses, politicians, priests, lawyers, judges, policemen or other “authority” figures.  And what little need there really is for most laws.  Left alone, they will blossom or degenerate, if you prefer, into full-fledged scofflaws.

I describe these people as “scofflaws” because “anarchist” was taken.  Again, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, anarchy means “lack of a leader.” The American Heritage Dictionary similarly defines it firstly as “absence of any form of political authority.” But the dictionary’s second and third definitions are, “political disorder and confusion” and “absence of any cohesive principle, such as a common standard or purpose.” So the modern connotations vary from the strict meaning.  Also, several historical varieties of “anarchism” involve the redistribution or even abolition of private property. I could have tried to fit the scofflaw into one of the other six dozen or so subcategories of anarchism—anarcho-capitalism, individual anarchism, anarcho-syndicalism, etc., but I just don’t have the time.  I’m speaking of scofflaws.

Scofflaws distrust the motives of government at every scale, and also those of corporations, syndications and conglomerations, which run the government. They don’t trust labor unions, organized religion or even organized crime. Nor do they put their faith in either major political party.
Collectively, scofflaws are neutral or completely fragmented on environmental issues. They do tend, however, to be skeptical of Washington D.C.-based environmental movements. They also tend to be skeptical of attempts to close backcountry roads or trails, because such closures often arise more from a desire for political control than a concern for the environment. 

As far as patriotism goes, scofflaws love their country to the degree that their government leaves them alone. 

Now if scofflaws are dangerous, so too are the wild lands into which they escape, because these allow latent scofflaws the opportunity to look back on society, however briefly, and make a judgment on the whole of it. That’s why people need an interpretation of the environment--a mantra about taming nature or preserving it--to keep them from realizing just how subversive the experience of escaping into it can be. And that’s why you’ll see an increased government presence on federal lands under the pretext of “protecting” them; to keep the people who own them under control.

Currently, for example, at the behest of environmental groups, the Park Service, Forest Service and BLM are closing roads which have been in use for decades, ostensibly to channel the public away from ecologically or archaeologically sensitive areas.  These roads, known as “highways,” originally established under Revised Statute 2477, were supposed to be protected from closure under the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976.  The federal government has gotten around its obligations in this regard by refusing to recognize those right-of-ways without documentation from the counties which manage them. In fact, the burden of proving those right-of-ways are not legitimate lies with the federal government.  The affected counties, many of them too cash-poor to contest every closure, have responded by claiming every single double track and cow trail in their jurisdiction as an RS 2477 right-of-way.

Back in 1996, when Bill Clinton was in office, a conglomeration of concessionaires and representatives from the RV, motorcycle and snowmobile industries, collectively known as the American Recreation Coalition, got congress’s approval for their scheme to transform the national parks, forests, and wilderness areas into revenue-generating entities.  They were pushing a program known as “fee demo,” though its opponents referred to it as the “Recreation Access Tax,” or RAT. It was so successful at paying for the extra employees and entrance stations necessary for self-implementation, and providing a little extra cash to the agencies responsible for maintaining public lands that its life was extended several times, and then it was upgraded into the “Federal Lands Recreation Enhancement Act” or FLREA.  The primary purpose of FLREA is to fleece visitors to national parks, forests and wilderness areas for services many of them don’t want or have already paid for with their taxes.

Perhaps the most serious development on BLM land, wilderness areas, national forests, parks and monuments, for scofflaws, at least, is their infiltration by Mexican cartels, which are growing marijuana there on an industrial scale. An agribusiness scale. Heavily armed rangers dressed like storm troopers converge on marijuana groves, arrest the growers and dig up the plants.  In some cases, however, the growers are protected by armed guards, some toting assault rifles.  Bullets are flying. Kayakers and hunters have been taken hostage by these folks.  Some national forests are also infested with meth. labs. Scofflaws, who like to get as far away from civilization as possible, will no doubt encounter meth. manufacturers and pot-growers in increasing numbers.  When they do, it would be prudent to be armed, and this is where things get complicated. The problem is, the rangers and DEA agents they come across will likely not understand why anybody but a criminal would arm him or herself for a jaunt into the backwoods. That is because they may have a stereotype of visitors who venture deep into public lands, with the exception of druggies, hunters and off-roaders, as peace-loving, tree-hugging, nature worshipping luddites trying to escape society’s industrial trappings. Encountering armed scofflaws, they may mistake them for hostile combatants. Scofflaws, who are averse to coercive behavior, may actively dispute their authority. 

At some point an upper-echelon bureaucrat will decide to go about things proactively, and the powers-that-be will close down all roads and trails leading into the various actual wildernesses except for official routes, which everyone will have to take, the purpose being to keep an eye on visitors and maximize entrance fee revenues. Sundry law agencies will institute random traffic stops on vehicles, searching for weapons and contraband.  Hikers will be searched by armed rangers.  Penalties for hiking or camping without a permit will increase dramatically.  Cameras will be installed in the forests, mesas and canyons.  Drone planes will circle overhead, hunting for pot groves and unauthorized campers and tracking backpackers, bikers, off-roaders, etc. Scofflaws will be shot.

What scofflaws need now, and what the majority of our population will wish for in the future, probably when the government finally does try to seize every handgun or require every citizen be fingerprinted and have his/her DNA sequenced and recorded in a permanent database, or when every financial transaction, no matter how trivial, must by law be processed electronically, or when traffic is tracked by remote cameras, or when employers begin forcing workers to piss in cups as a condition for keeping their jobs (wait a minute…), is a refuge from the psychological, political, legal, religious, economic and even physical coercion we are daily subject to at the hands of our employers and governments and everybody in-between.  And the only place we will find this refuge will be far from our cities.

Scofflaws believe the drug war is a big mistake, as are the extreme measures law enforcement is taking to prosecute it.  They would like to see the Park Service, Forest Service and BLM acknowledge that there is a segment of the population which cannot enjoy its public lands under a ranger’s supervision.  They would like to see the RAT stomped dead, and legitimate roads left open. 

So why should the great, well-adjusted, sophisticated, domesticated, investigated majority care what becomes of scofflaws, who are beyond the normal distribution curve for non-conformity?  Because scofflaws are the canaries in the coal mine.  Every day there’s news about police tangling with extremists of one kind or another—home-grown terrorists, religious fanatics, hardened criminals and racists.  But scofflaws, for the most part, don’t have an economic or ideological agenda beyond just wanting to be left alone.  And when the authorities start going after scofflaws with as much zeal as they do other classes of criminals, the simple desire not to be molested by our own government will have become criminalized for all of us.