I Should Have Been a Criminal

When Deeply Held Beliefs Break Against Reality

On the Fourth of July, we celebrate liberty. We light fireworks for freedom.
We sing songs of justice. And somewhere beneath it all, we still say the words: “With liberty and justice for all.”

I used to believe those words. As a child, I stood straight and recited them with hand over heart—believing in the promise they held. I believed in the courtroom dramas and investigations of my youth—Perry Mason, Matlock, Columbo—where evidence mattered, where truth was pursued, where justice prevailed.

But the day I found myself standing in a windowless room beneath a hospital—no jury, no witnesses, no voice—I understood something I never imagined would be true.

Criminals have more rights than one who’s liberty has been taken away for an alleged mental illness. Were I a criminal I could have stood beneath the banner of “innocent until proven guilty.” I could have questioned, represented myself and seen evidence against me.

And had I been falsely accused and exonerated, there would have been a road to restitution. My lawyers all told me ... If this had been criminal, this wouldn’t be dragging out in court and you’d have been compensated by now based on the illegality of it all. The system, flawed as it is, sometimes gets it right and recognizes when it injures a person.

But in civil commitment, you don’t need to do anything wrong.
No crime. No charge. No facts, no hearing that matters, just a checked box, a doctor's word, a few scribbles on a form by someone who has never met you—and everything you are begins to disappear.

They never called my physician of 25 years. They never reviewed a single record. No test. No scan. No proof. My bloodwork was pristine.
My mind clear. My history uneventful—until they rewrote it.

The Shiny Illusion of Rights

Because rights—those glittering laws and State and Federal Constitution—mean nothing if no one is there to uphold them. They belong not to the person, but to those who wield the power to bestow them or not.

And once someone in power says you're unwell, your voice is no longer admissible in your own life. What was once your truth becomes a liability.
What was once your story is now suspect, because if you don’t regurgitate the story they have created for you then you lack INSIGHT into the severe mental illness they have now created in order to hold you under the law.

What if there was no problem? What if the only crisis was the one created—
by those who profit from the naming? Can you imagine being locked away for nothing at all? I couldn’t. Until I was.

The Machine That Must Be Stopped

The truth is, in this shadow system, they don’t need to prove anything—just delay everything. Courts avert their gaze citing “under advisement” and many don’t even ask questions. The bias and position already etched in stone. They pass the buck. They draft orders that preserve fiction, not truth. Just fragments—rearranged to resemble legitimacy. What’s written isn’t factual. It’s strategic. A paper trail to justify what no one wants to own.

Because to face what really happened would require repair. And repair demands admission of harm. And harm means the system is not just flawed—it’s failing.

Down this rabbit hole is a nightmare foisted daily onto people in a never-ending machine that few know about or understand. I didn’t either. The nightmare that has been created and the deep damage that goes with it is too horrific to contemplate, so silence and dismissal become the norm. Because if they faced it, the machine would have to stop. And stopped it must be.

What Kind of Justice Is This?

So today, as I hear the boom of fireworks, as children play in the water, parades march by, and families BBQ I wonder:

What kind of justice protects those who fabricate under color of law?
What kind of freedom permits a system to silence truth and call it care?
What kind of nation promises liberty and justice for all—except for those erased by a diagnosis and buried in sealed records?

Because now I know:

I should have been a criminal.
At least then, my voice might have mattered. My life might have been acknowledged. My truth might have had a place to stand.

But here, in this shadow system, there is no easy restitution or recourse. No one to undo the lie once it is written. I know because nineteen years later the perpetrators are still echoing the same false story they created as if the truth never existed.