As a tour guide for Discover Sarasota Tours, I know quite a lot about Sarasota, its history, its future, and its folklore. So when the producers of a TV show called Monsters Across America started looking for experts and witnesses of the Skunk Ape, Florida’s answer to Bigfoot, I was on their short list.
After the interview in St. Armands Circle, the producer asked me to write down what I want under my name on the title card. I wrote “Discover Sarasota Tour Guide”. He said I could have another, so since I was still celebrating my Patreon launch as the Autonomous Nation of Stevetopia, I wrote “Emperor of Stevetopia”.
I filled him in on my decision to secede from the U.S. federal government, and he told me it wasn’t his first time hearing about people claiming their personal sovereignty. After getting a law degree he never used, he one day happened upon flier looking for volunteer traffic judges and so he signed up. He said he was surprised at how many people came through fighting traffic tickets based on their personal sovereignty.
It occurred to me that there is an actual movement of sovereigns. I’m sure that some don’t think that the U.S. federal government is all that well-balanced and some that just don’t like to be messed with, but in a country that claims to be the best example of a democracy, and a third to a half don’t vote, depending upon the races, it would seem that there are quite a few who don’t want anything to do with it.
Not to say that all non-voters are sovereigns. Many non-voters are merely apathetic and don’t care. In many cases, sovereigns care more than the average voter, and have invested a great deal of time and consideration on their role as a responsible citizen.
And so the conversation continues. In the meantime, I also ran into a woman who claimed that she once saw an actual Skunk Ape. 😉
I also wanted to share my song of the month. Every month, I’m releasing a new song through my Patreon account. My patrons get an actual mp3 of it, but I will be making videos of each song so that people can listen to it with some cool visuals on YouTube in the hopes that they’ll want more, become subscribers, and empower me to produce my songs professionally.
This will empower me to experiment with what I call ABC2 Economics. It’s a more balanced economic system based on a network model rather than the hierarchical model that has created such inequality. ABC2 Economics operates according to the flow of currency toward Artistry, Business, Citizenry, and Community.
To find out more, subscribe to my YouTube channel, my newsletter at www.stevemc.xyz, or become a patron at www.patreon.com/stevetopian. You can also find me on Facebook and Twitter as @Stevetopian and on Instagram at @stevemc.xyz.
