Monday, October 25 12:00 AM ET

New Hampshire Residents Choose to Die

Concord, NH - Reacting to increased legislative encroachment on civil liberties, the residents of New Hampshire remained true to the motto printed on their license plate "Live free or die" and expired as a group at 9:42pm yesterday.

The residents fell lifelessly to the ground in perfect synchrony, making a strong statement against the slow erosion of individual rights. This large-scale mortality marks the largest act of arbitrary natural death in the history of the United States.

"We judged the Federal Government had finally gone too far," New Hampshire Governor Craig Benson might have said if he were still alive. "We in New Hampshire knew that being free is sometimes more important than life itself. We hope our exodus from the ranks of the living will be a clarion call to the world that we would have preferred to live free."

"Some might say we took an old slogan too literally by signaling our civil protest in such an extreme manner," Benson also did not say, since he was dead. "But we're just doing what we said we'd do. We were not about to let the Federal Government make liars out of us."

The members of the state Supreme Court had ruled the state 'not free' just moments before expiring Tuesday evening. The court cited several encroachments on the freedom of state members, including the DMCA, the Patriot Act, wage slavery, and bad traffic.

The business outlook for the New Hampshire region is largely bleak. High tech, education and tourism industries have been wiped out by the complete absence of local workers. In addition, any new residents who try to move in and squat in now vacant homes are parting from their mortal existence as soon as it becomes clear that they intend to stay. Business prospects have been looking up for Massachusetts border mortuaries and obituary writers, after an unexpected business boom.

The recently deceased residents of New Hampshire, while regretting having died, might be largely in support of their arbitrary death.

"No, I don't regret anything," Fred Birches, a Tilton area farmer probably would say if he were magically revived from the dead. "Sometimes you just have to let your life end based on the abstract concept of freedom and some poorly thought out laws. We took great pride while we were living, in our state motto, and we're glad to have lived up to it."