James -

It’s pretty obvious that a lot of us are listening to your Harm City experiences; it’s a combination of current social commentary, of good stories of the kind Jack London might have pulled from his own Arctic experience about fighting wolves in the White Silence, and of inspiration to encourage each other as Men to achieve the level of physical and mental competence (and the resulting confidence) that’s needed in order to calmly face the predators and dangers lurking in today’s cities.

I have to note that despite the implication (often from your readers) that the conditions you face daily, by choice, are “universal” or “coast to coast” in nature in this country, they are not in fact America-wide.   There are still places, inhabited by a total of a hundred million people or more across the nation, where it’s possible to live without locking doors, where old ladies can walk down a shaded street with no expectation of being assaulted, and where car wheels remain on the cars they were sold on for their entire life.   I live in one of those places.

My fear is that the rot that you see every day in Harm City, the festering decay caused by 70 years or more of “progressive” social engineering, by the never-ending building of the Welfare Plantation for the benefit of the overseers, and by the generational hand-out dependence addiction … is coming here, and visibly.   From the “cover your hand as you type in your PIN” to “Press 1 for English” to “Community Watch” signs in the country where they’ve never been, to hearing dindu spawn grabbing their crotches and hooting at each other in the Quik-Mart parking lot “HEY LONZO YOU EAT DAT PUSSY LAS NITE, YOU TAP DAT ASS?”, screaming out anything they know will upset the white rabbits for the pleasure of watching them turn their heads and walk faster.

We’ve taken to heart the advice about staying out of “Fights” as you’ve defined them, which belong only in rings and gyms, and concentrating on minimizing escalation and staying on self-defense. And that’s good “When You’re Food” in “Bad Places”, grossly outnumbered, the whole local scene against you, and concentrating on survival.

But how can we extend the advice and experience from inside the “Bad Places” to the outside, so that some of us can try our best to KEEP them from BEING Bad Places in the future?   It seems to me that you could multiply the benefit of what you know by teaching people the right way to STOP what happened in Baltimore, the way the Jews could have stopped the Holocaust if the first 50 police to kick in a Jewish door were drilled by a shot from a Mauser.   (That’s just an analogy; I’m not suggesting that guns be in this equation at all.   That’s a different discussion, and not your field anyhow).

IS there a way to let Sha’qan and Alonzo know that acting like retarded chimps in the store that my daughters shop in is a really bad, painful idea?   How do you act manfully and decisively without going over the line and ending up in chokey yourself, even when the police are still somewhat “on your side”?   How do you avoid the soul-destroying trap of “just look the other way” and “don’t get involved” when you know that the future of civilization is at stake?

How do we, out here, stop being the rabbits?

Honestly La Mano, I did not get into writing the Harm City material in order to arrive at a social suggestion, let alone a solution. I have cared very little about society in general, just individuals. This is my own dysfunction and I've grown to weary to try and change myself. This has just been an attempt to leave a memo on the desk of life for the replacement I'll never know, just a message in a bottle.

I never thought I'd have more than a few hundred readers.

I never thought I'd have so many people who cared about society ask my opinion about keeping it from getting worse.

But the number of people of character, with genuine concern who have written, and the number of good people I have seen rabbit for the high grass, has begun to weigh on me.

The question you laid out here is beyond me to answer. The question, though, should occupy any men who have not given up their hairy ghost to the bald system.

Perhaps using me as a scout, with smarter people with different skill sets pondering the question of how to keep our overseers from laying more anarcho-tyranny eggs, is a good start. If it's anything bigger than avoiding trouble, fighting, ordering information into written form or moving inventory, I'm as lost as the next guy.

I will return to this post often.

Thank you.