Warsaw Poland, May 1943....Black and White

The myth of the Gray man protection from being listed....

When it comes to the incoming badness, I have seen more than one comment from someone who plans to just stay low, under the radar, be the gray man and just blend in. Gray man is a term for someone who just does not stand out in a crowd, can just get lost in plain sight. In many ways, it is a mythical way to stay off the government list of people to monitor, especially in this day and age of commercial and government electronic surveillance and record keeping.

A short story from a conversation this summer. I very good friend of mine and I were discussing the potential for the coming conflict and what to do. It turns out his parents are from the former communist country. His father fought on the vanquished side in WWII. After the war, he tried to simply restart his life and rebuild his family. However, he was not communist and said the wrong things to the wrong people. He was arrested in a political arrest and held in a prison camp. The lesson my freind learned was to stay low, say little or nothing, and not draw any attention, the gray man defense plan.

When bad folks have taken over a country, they have always had lists. Lists built on public information. It will happen here as well. It already has. But I have never done anything to get on a list you say.

Lets ay you are in DC and need a quick list. Lets try an easy exercise, an easy one, they can get all of the concealed weapon permits for an area, state, or region. Or how about getting a list of all credit card purchases and sort them on certain vendors like J&G or Midway or Cabella's. Then a sort for specific items like firearms and ammunition. Every firearm purchased commercially has a federal firearm transfer document and many have recorded background checks, lists..... Or how about a more complex search, census records, are you a southerner? Southerners are generally more firearm friendly than others. If so there is a high probability you own a firearm. Voting records, yes they keep records, do you get mail from one party or the other? Live in the city or a farm? Farmers normally have several guns. How about a list of all the hunting licenses from last season?  Ok, now since the internet companies are in the government pocket via various terrorism laws, get lists of the internet sites every person has read in the last 365 days. Rack them according to politics.  Gotcha, your on a list. 

And none these sources require the domestic surveillance assets of the thousands of spooks in our state and federal governments like the NSA, DHS, fusion centers, ATF/FBI, ad naseum.Add those folks and the lists can go on for ever.

This will take too much time you say? Hardly, most of those lists already exist. But for the lists that don't exist yet, all that data is on computers somewhere. It is a database file. A novice database technician can put together a program to do all of that data manipulation in minutes. Multiple lists can be generated before the dinner in time for dawn SWAT raids.

Also consider they don't have to be correct lists. in a government raid, there are no points for being right or wrong. Either way, the bad people get to shoot dogs, and beat on people, maybe even get into a testosterone driven fire fight they can use all that new military hardware in. Wrong house, oops, are they sorry, of course not, you should have lived somewhere else.

The reality is that under any statist system, you are on the list, period. By the fact that you exist, just as any machine part, you are on the list of parts in the collective. There is no on versus off the list. Some parts of the list are higher than others, for a time, but all are on the list. To not be on the list means you are a machine of one....an individual.and that just is not allowed.

Bottom line, there is no gray man, you can not hide from the tide. Ask an american indian, a kulak,  Ukrainian peasants , German Jews from Warsaw (never mind, they all died), ask a person who fled East Europe after WWII. Chose, you must be either one side or the other gray or blue (1860), white or red (Russia) etc. Understand, they will assign you a team if you fail to self select....there will be a test.