Many are asking what I am doing at this stage of my journey to renewing my driver’s license.  I have 7 women and 2 men ready to buck the system and marry me if that what it will take.  I have had many unconventional ideas from taking my birth certificate and my old social security card to the DMV and getting a photo ID just like I was 16 again and then going back to take the written and driving test like a teenager to get my license in the name on the original birth certificate.  And many of you are as anarchistic as I am saying “screw it, put white light around your car and just drive with good intentions”.  So I have an arsenal of creative ideas as I slog my way through the crippled system that governs us with my “troublemaker lawyer”.  And yes it would be easier to just drive and say screw it but I am interested in seeing if this system we call democracy will work for me at this most basic level.

Right now I have friends who drive me and I have ordered a magnetic sign for my car which arrives this week that says “Driving Ms. Maya”.  I am working on some pieces to send to the newspapers, on one persons story of how the law is not on my side and in fact my story is like thousands who are lost in the new Photo ID system.  I will share these letters with you soon.  I am writing my political officials.  I am speaking out.  And I am completely in the game and jumping all the hoops, one after the other in order to see what is possible when I align with our governing bodies.

So, this is how it stands.  Today I fill out 5 pages of questions from the FBI.  I also explain to them the situation I now have with my fingerprints. That translates as “I have no acceptable fingerprints”.  It seems as though they are a little “iffy” due to curling irons and potters wheels and that they may be rejected.  If they are rejected then after waiting nine weeks to hear from the official FBI with a letter that says “we hate your fingerprints, do them again”, I take the letter, get them redone and send the paperwork in once again and wait nine weeks to see if I am acceptable.  Oh yes and I pay allot of money each time to the FBI.  This is a process that could take up to …yes….27 weeks.  So my maverick lawyer Martha who is one of the nicest people you could meet, filed an appeal to the district court of Denver for altering the original name change that was part of the debacle in the first place.  A faster process she thinks.

Now when Martha filed this appeal she in no uncertain terms was told it was “unprecedented and had not been done”.  Yep a first time appeal.  So, the appeal was filed anyway which gives us a chance to stand before an official court judge and plead my case.  Martha will stand in for me and I will be on a speaker phone.  Soon I hope.But then there is Christmas and then there is New Years and so on and so on.  So I hold a vision every day for a kind judge who is not distracted by the holiday and who cannot wait to put me behind the driver’s seat.  Should I tell him the name of my car is a Rogue?

So…what does all this detail say.  All these twists and turns, the closed doors no one has tried to open before?  What does it say that one woman, with one car, who has a perfect legal record, is highly educated, with money to even get a lawyer, that this one person in over 300 million people in the USA, cannot get an answer to a simple thing like changed the spelling on a document that is nearly 10 years old?

If this is my fate, to be told that I might fall into what is termed the “gray zone” and never get a driver’s license because no one can figure out what to do with me and the law has no provision for such a situation, then what about the masses of people in our system that are disabled, could not afford a lawyer if they needed one, who have no one advocating for them and become unbelievably confused and hopeless and give up?  What about them?

What my personal journey reveals is that our system is a system of smoke and mirrors, is flawed down to the core and the basic fabric of our judicial system.  It means that the power of the law is now being primarily dispensed by the very folks who do not have most of the rights of the privileged few who make the laws.  These are people who are underpaid, have no insurance, and who are angry at the very system they work for.  That there is a perception of power in the workers who are, in fact, powerless people who stand between a little person like me and the Judges who most of the time never hear a case like mine. They stand there to hold the energy that creates the fear. This psychotic truth extends to our police force, our military, our social security system, our insurance companies, churches, hospitals and beyond.  The truth is that the sheep keep the sheep in line.  A brilliant orchestration by the elite few.

So, I am bringing a few things to this reality.  I have a voice.  I am a writer.  I have the time, the money and the energy to not give up, which is precisely what the system wants.   I will not do what they want.  I will not go away.  Because this drivers license is about my freedom to go where I need or want to go.  And, just like Occupy Wall Street, we all need to look at all the ways our freedoms are slipping through our fingers and we do not even see it happening until we wake up one day and we live in an occupied country where the sheep are now lined up for slaughter.

Behind my humor, which is just as true as all I have written here, is a call for me to become awake, aware and responsible to use my voice even if it about getting a Social Security card, renewing a driver’s license, marrying a woman if I want to, calling my local newspaper, writing my congress person.  I think cleaning my house or going to the mall to get one more Christmas gift can just wait don’t you think

Note:  I would be greatly interested in your feedback about this blog entry.  Please comment below or email me at mayachristobel@gmail.com