MyArrest

Apparently my arrest is imminent. I appear to have broken the law, but honestly I thought I was doing the right thing. It all started as a dispute with a neighbor some years ago. In fact it was the father of my present neighbor and my late father who had the original argument. That started when our neighbor threw a Molotov cocktail through our window on the night I was born and tried to kill us all. The argument has never ended; my neighbors still want to kill us.

Dad was a tough old guy; he’d fought for the British in the Second World War against the Nazis. Our neighbor was on the other side, but that’s ancient history now, so I shan’t go into those details. Suffice it to say dad and the family got through that bad period and we stayed on in our house. In fact, despite all our neighbors, and their friends trying to attack us every so often we became quite successful at farming, something my family hadn’t been allowed to do wherever they lived for too long to remember, and to everyone’s surprise, not too bad at fighting either.

The years passed by and we developed some more industries in our neighborhood, and we learned how to look after ourselves. Now our family had grown and didn’t need or get much help from anyone else. We even took in our relatives from overseas who had to run away when our neighbor’s friends threw them out just because they were members of our family.

Each time our neighbors tried to take our land they made everyone crazy. It seemed strange to us that the police in New York told us we were in breach of the law when all we did was to fight back every time we were attacked, but we understand that there has to be laws so we do our best to obey them all, even the ones we don’t much like.

What our family finds really difficult to understand was the incidents that happened a couple of years back when our neighbors crept into our home one night and took two of our boys’ hostage. We never found out what happened to one of them, but the other one was returned to us dead. The neighbors didn’t even apologize for our loss but everyone in the entire neighborhood went mad when we tried to rescue our boys.

Over the last few years our neighbors kept telling us over a loudspeaker that they wanted to kill our entire family and they backed this up by firing a gun into our backyard every day.

Some days the neighbors fired the gun 80 to 100 times but when we called the police in New York they told us not to worry because the gun was homemade and not too deadly unless you took a direct hit, although they thought the neighbors might have some proper guns coming in from out of town, and these might be very dangerous.

The proof that our neighbor wasn’t really trying to kill our children when they shot at them in our yard was the fact that they didn’t really aim the gun when they fired it and therefore the number of injuries our family took was just a series of playful accidents.

We went looking for our neighbors to discuss this several times and each time we did the police threatened to arrest us and the local newspaper printed stories calling us monsters and killers and aggressors.

It was very upsetting but we eventually found that the neighbors were actually hiding in tunnels that they’d dug under our property. We went into some of the tunnels and found guns and ammunition and plans to attack us when we were sleeping. We showed all this to the police and they told us not to worry because these were defensive tunnels and the neighbors were only using them to bring in medicines and food from their neighbors on the other side of their property.

We asked the police if that were the case why did they also have guns and ammunition in the tunnel on this side and why did they fire these guns at us and tell everyone they wanted us dead and gone?

The police told us not to worry as this was no real threat but we should understand that our neighbors were simply trying to convince their neighbors that they wanted us out, but in reality the whole thing was a sham, for now, although they do want us dead when they are ready. Just before that occurred the police told us that they would discuss the matter with the neighbor and that they’re sure they can convince them not to kill too many of us.

After waiting for the police to have that conversation with the neighbors for the last 8 years and nothing happening we decided we had better sort this our for ourselves. We picked up some of our own guns and we went looking for our neighbors to stop them shooting at us.

We knew that everyone else in the district would get upset when we did this, because that’s what always happens when we try to stop our neighbors shooting at us. In fact this time we were told that as our guns were built in our garage we clearly had an unfair advantage and when we used our guns this would be disproportionate.

So, to be fair we sent a note to our neighbors telling them what we were going to do, and when and where, and then we telephoned them to make sure that they’d get the message. We wanted to discuss these matters with the men in the family who liked to fire guns at our kids but they pretended not to read our notes, or hear our messages.

In fact their tough boys decided that the best way to fight us was to use their kids as a shield. This isn’t the way we do things, as we try to look after our kids, and in fact, despite our arguments with our neighbor, we want to look after their kids.

Our grandmother, whose name was Golda Meir once said it better than I can, “We can forgive the neighbors for killing our children. We can’t forgive them for forcing us to kill their children. We will only have peace with the neighbors when they love their children more than they hate us.”

As I said to the police officer who came to arrest me, “maybe, one day.”