The Traffic Citation of Christ First of all, for the terminally dense, let me say that I am not trying to compare myself to Christ. If you are dumb enough to think that, you probably shouldn't be reading this, but worry not, for Halifax County, North Carolina has a job for you. The title was inspired by one part of this ridiculous story, and if you take the time, you might even be surprised to learn the truth of it all. Some people have certainly expressed surprise that I am willing to post such personal information on the internet for everyone to see, but you must understand that I come from a tradition of idealists who feel it is our duty to bare our souls if necessary in order to see that justice is done. Every story has a beginning, but sometimes it is truly hard to decide where the audience should be introduced. I suppose I shall begin with the newer story, the one that made the older story suddenly take on its own elements of horror whereas previously it had been but an unfortunate footnote to my life. Thus we will begin with a foreboding letter... After spending over 3 hours in line at a local Department of Public Safety office to obtain my license to operate a motor vehicle in the State of Georgia, I was suitably dismayed to receive merely a temporary license with the assurance that my permanent copy would arrive in the mail soon. A couple of weeks later, I was pleasantly greeted with a nice little envelope in my mailbox that was return addressed to the Georgia Department of Public Safety. I felt a brief flood of thankfulness that my license had finally arrived. Alas it had not. To view the letter's contents As you can imagine from reading the letter, I was pretty concerned about this sudden state of affairs. Unsure where to begin, I tried to contact the State of Georgia in as many different ways as I could. Here is one of my efforts, and you can read their strange pass-the-buck responses, but if you are in a hurry to cut to the meat of the story, I suppose you can skip it and head straight for the real villain of this story. As you can see, if you read it, I was pretty angered by the unfair treatment so far. And as the rest of this story shall prove, the rude employees of the State of Georgia are nevertheless not the real culprits in this situation, though thematically they certainly have helped perpetuate the sins of laziness and vanity. Now, after a few phone calls, at serious long distance expense [have you ever been on hold with a government agency while calling long distance?], I learned the truth of the matter, and was even more flabbergasted. You will be surprised to learn what the hideous crime I committed was. This is the older story suddenly taking on its own elements of horror whereas it had previously been but an unpleasant footnote. I was treated as a liar, who had purposefully tried to avoid paying an already absurd fine, by the phone personnel at the Halifax County Courthouse, and so I began an email campaign with the Halifax County employees and the North Carolina Division of Motor Vehicles in order to try to reach someone who would help me and stop simply ignoring my repeated pleas. Perhaps some of these letters strayed slightly beyond the bounds of deep toe-sucking politeness, but believe me when I say that numerous Halifax lackeys had far overstepped those boundaries already. Some of my friends from back in Richmond even began to write on my behalf, all of us just trying to get somebody to do the right thing. Then one of those lawyers contacted me, you probably know the type. Mr. Turner Stephenson advocated the negligence of his County. He started off by trying to claim that somebody else was responsible and by automatically suggesting that I must be a liar since I was having trouble with Halifax. Well, you can read for yourself. Anyway, I forwarded him the notice from his own State government that noted that his county was indeed responsible [you have already read that notice if you have been following this tragic story], and tried once again to convince him to stop cruising the waters for blood and help out an innocent victim. Meanwhile other friends continued to try to give me character references. I am grateful for their aid, though unfortunately it has not yet shattered the layer of incompetent sloth that encases the very people that I need to correct their malicious mistakes. Now, I truly bet that some part of you has been thinking that I must be some fruitcake who forgot to pay a ticket or something and got pissed off when the consequences came to call, but glory-be, a miracle came to pass and the advocate admitted in his snide, greasy way that I had in fact tried to pay my fine. And thus came the brutally funny letter I sent our devilish advocate wherein I hypothesized the fate of Christ himself were he to be so unfortunate as to pass before the gentiles of Halifax County, the very letter one of my friends called the most angry, brutally-funny thing he had ever seen. Ah, but wait, this story is not yet over. You have hopefully read through its travesty of misappropriated government funds used to pay incompetent and irresponsible government pencil pushers. Tragically, as the "brutally funny" revelation notes, at this point no solution has actually come about, and I am hoping that you can help me get past continuously irresponsible responses like this. Cannot these people even keep the contents of the same envelope together?. Though true resolution will never occur, for I can never be sure that they will not discover some other lost fee that has been left unannounced and thus unpaid, this matter seems to be drawing to a relative close. The county of Halifax sent me back my original check, and a receipt for paying this time with a money order which they accepted. They also provided me with a copy of the summons to court that I never received. I still have not received the copy of the clearance notice that North Carolina's DMV said they mailed to me. I still cannot understand how they could try me without my presence and how they can justify not locating me. I guarantee you that if I had killed somebody they would have found me, however it seems more profitable in cases such as this for the State to conveniently fail to do so. One thing that puzzles me is the fact that the original ticket has my address from Before I moved to North Carolina. The officer must have asked for an address, yet on the ticket she has checked that the source was my drivers license. At that time, I cannot recall whether I had both Virginia and North Carolina licenses or not. I am not sure why the ticket address ended up being incorrect and it bothers me to wonder if I was complicit in this particular mistake or not. This is not the tale of the heroic soldiers who stormed the beaches of Normandy, nor the touching sacrifices of Sister Theresa to save the sick and poor dying in India, nor of course that of the Biblical savior of mankind. This is more the sort of tale that inspired someone to write the magnificent movie script for Fight Club. This is the tale of the little guy getting shafted once too often by a bunch of dumb fucks that comprise "the system". This is the sort of story that sometimes ends with great men like Patrick Henry crying "Give me Liberty or Give Me Death!" or with otherwise sober Bostonians dressing up like Indians and dumping the contents of merchant vessels into the harbor. Perhaps you will not be quite so inspired, but if you can find it within yourself to make just one little strike on our behalf, for you may be the next helpless victim, then take the time to write to even just one of the people below to let them know how their actions are endemic of a sacrilegious corruption of our Liberty and Justice for All. North Carolina DMV finally
faxed me a blurry release form, I hope it is enough, I still do not have
my permanent license
Other victims have written to me and it appears as though this behavior on the part of North Carolina officials is ritually habitual and consistently abusive. It seems criminal to me for a state or county to provide faulty information to another state or government body of a nature that causes your liberty or property to be threatened or compromised, especially when said state required me to send them a signed permission form to share information exonerating me. Sic Semper Tyrannis - Thus Ever to Tyrants Copyright © Conrad Hubbard |