I’m celebrating thanksgiving this week. America makes a big deal about it, and it is undoubtedly the start of the winter holiday season.

America has pinned down this holiday in November but almost everyone in human history celebrates the harvest. It’s a lot of work to bring in the things we’ve grown and we are grateful to realize that things have grown yet again.

The next holiday here is Christmas which isn’t as celebrated everywhere and everywhen like a harvest festival. There is one aspect of Christmas this is near universal, though.

The nativity happened in Bethlehem because of bureaucracy. Remember? It was a government requirement that every had to be registered in the place they were from. Ceasar Augustus himself was involved.

In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. 2 (This was the first census that took place while[a] Quirinius was governor of Syria.) 3 And everyone went to their own town to register.
Luke Chapter 2

As much as every people group in the world celebrates harvest, all of them despise the bureaucracy. It’s a very old tradition.

The Roman empire didn’t start this kind of empire government. The Romans are famous for copying the Greeks. Alexander the Great had an empire that lasted long past his life and almost up until the age of Jesus’ birth.

The proof of their influence was the continuation of the fees that the government imposed on the people therein.

I haven’t found an example, but I heard that during the Hellenic empire, fictional stories of pirates who got around all the government taxes were very popular.

The story of getting out from under the thumb of The Man as he is known to me now.

People are the ones who create and then submit to the empires. And then we don’t. Or maybe we do, but only to a point.

As I study the literature of humans across time and space, I know there are many examples of how people feel and react to the control of government. I’m not done with this idea.