Posted on 01/05/2015 5:13:37 AM PST by Dick Bachert
For those of us who have managed to survive 2014 with our lives intact and our freedoms hanging by a thread, it has been a year of crackdowns, clampdowns, shutdowns, showdowns, shootdowns, standdowns, knockdowns, putdowns, breakdowns, lockdowns, takedowns, slowdowns, meltdowns, and never-ending letdowns.
We’ve been held up, stripped down, faked out, photographed, frisked, fracked, hacked, tracked, cracked, intercepted, accessed, spied on, zapped, mapped, searched, shot at, tasered, tortured, tackled, trussed up, tricked, lied to, labeled, libeled, leered at, shoved aside, saddled with debt not of our own making, sold a bill of goods about national security, tuned out by those representing us, tossed aside, and taken to the cleaners.
As I point out in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, we’ve had our freedoms turned inside out, our democratic structure flipped upside down, and our house of cards left in a shambles.
We’ve had our children burned by flashbang grenades, our dogs shot, and our old folks hospitalized after “accidental” encounters with marauding SWAT teams. We’ve been told that as citizens we have no rights within 100 miles of our own border, now considered “Constitution-free zones.” We’ve had our faces filed in government databases, our biometrics crosschecked against criminal databanks, and our consumerist tendencies catalogued for future marketing overtures.
We’ve been given the runaround on government wrongdoing, starting with President Obama’s claim that the National Security Agency has never abused its power to spy on Americans’ phone calls and emails. All the while, the NSA has been racing to build a supercomputer that could break through “every kind of encryption used to protect banking, medical, business and government records around the world.”
We’ve seen the police transformed from community peacekeepers to point guards for the militarized corporate state. We’ve been deemed suspicious for engaging in such dubious activities as talking too long on a cell phone and stretching too long before jogging.
We’ve been arrested for all manner of “crimes” that never used to be considered criminal, let alone uncommon or unlawful, behavior: letting our kids walk to the playground alone, giving loose change to a homeless man, feeding the hungry, and living off the grid.
We’ve been sodomized, victimized, jeopardized, demoralized, traumatized, stigmatized, vandalized, demonized, polarized and terrorized, often without having done anything to justify such treatment.
We’ve been railroaded into believing that it matters whether we vote Republican or Democrat, when truth be told, as the corporate state knows all too well, the only color that matters in politics is green.
We’ve gone from having privacy in our inner sanctums to having nowhere to hide. Even our cities have become wall-to-wall electronic concentration camps, with police now able to record hi-def video of everything that takes place within city limits.
We’ve had our schools locked down, our students handcuffed and arrested, our children’s biometrics stored, their school IDs chipped, their movements tracked, and their data bought, sold and bartered for profit by government contractors.
We’ve been rendered enemy combatants in our own country. We’ve had the very military weapons we funded with our hard-earned tax dollars used against us.
We’ve been silenced, censored and forced to conform. We’ve been shot by police for reaching for a license during a traffic stop, reaching for a baby during a drug bust, carrying a toy sword down a public street, and wearing headphones that hamper our ability to hear.
We’ve been tasered for talking back to police, tackled for taking pictures of police abuses, and threatened with jail time for invoking our rights.
We’ve had our possessions seized and stolen by law enforcement agencies looking to cash in on asset forfeiture schemes, our jails privatized and used as a source of cheap labor for megacorporations, and our buying habits turned into suspicious behavior by a government readily inclined to view its citizens as terrorists.
We’ve been told that national security is more important than civil liberties, that the best way not to get raped by police is to “follow the law,” that what a police officer says in court will be given preference over what video footage shows, that an upright posture and acne are sufficient reasons for a cop to suspect you of wrongdoing, that police can stop and search a driver based solely on an anonymous tip, and that police officers have every right to shoot first and ask questions later if they feel threatened.
Now there are those who still insist that they are beyond the reach of the police state because they have done nothing wrong and have nothing to fear. Yet the lesson of 2014 is simply this: in a police state, you’re either a cop or you’re one of the little people. Right now, we are the little people, the servants, the serfs, the grunts who must obey without question or suffer the consequences.
If there is to be any hope in 2015 for restoring our freedoms and reclaiming our runaway government, we will have to start by breathing life into those three powerful words that set the tone for everything that follows in the Constitution: “we the people.”
Get mad, get outraged, get off your duff and get out of your house, get in the streets, get in people’s faces, get down to your local city council, get over to your local school board, get your thoughts down on paper, get your objections plastered on protest signs, get your neighbors, friends and family to join their voices to yours, get your representatives to pay attention to your grievances, get your kids to know their rights, get your local police to march in lockstep with the Constitution, get your media to act as watchdogs for the people and not lapdogs for the corporate state, get your act together, and get your house in order.
In other words, get moving. Time is growing short, and the police state is closing in. Power to the people!
I agree with you. The cycle of civilization. We are on the downhill side of it, where decadence and apathy reign, and as a result we get the government we deserve.
I'm not anti-cop as some might claim, I appreciate your service and am on your side, as long as it's on the side of the Constitution. Stay safe.
That’s fighting back. Of course, I’m not sure that’s the course they should take. They’ve been living in a socialist world for decades. Along with plenty of whites.
If a black commits a crime and the police are called it’s only natural the cop will question black peoplel who fit the description. But to drive up to someone walking down the street and ask to see their papers is wrong. It’s going to be done to all of us soon.
“That’s fighting back.”
No. It’s looting and anarchy.
I will say this. The new recruits that we (older cops) see coming I to the job have a very different view of police work. I am a training officer and the first thing I give my trainee is a thumb drive with the fourth, fifth, and sixth amendments...along with policies. Va Legal guidelines. It seems that they have a hard time wrapping their heads around the concept that there are some things that police just can’t do. No kidding on this...I work in a college town. We get creamed in breaking and entering a every school break. So we try to get as much foot patrol in those off campus housing areas as possible. Well, one enterprising young officer went around checking doors to the homes and apts. if he found one unlocked he made entry into the house and looked around. He wrote a report that the doors were unsecured. We pulled him aside. I told him if I go to the store and left my door unlocked...and he went in my house I would sue the shit out of him. Unbelievable
I wonder how much of that is crappy education, or an upbringing with helicopter parents and no developed sense of personal boundaries and limits, or just general cluelessness.
Things might have turned out worse here in Texas if somebody was taking a nap in that home and their handgun was close by when they woke up startled...
Excellent point, and one that I had never considered.
I hadn’t thought about people abusing the 911 systems because of the easy access to phones now.
http://dailycaller.com/2014/02/21/cops-arrest-jogging-woman-because-she-couldnt-hear-them/
Yeah, that’s just like the Third Reich.
Thank you for the kind words. Be safe.
“Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; if it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it.” — Judge Learned Hand, 1944
OK, great use of sarcasm. Just so I’m clear, the time to actually resist in all ways, legal or otherwise, comes when they start marching people into the camps or shoveling them into the ovens?
Would it not be more prudent to resist with all means when the rulers have “only” gone so far as to:
Create a regulatory system when your privately owned business only exists at the sufferance of the nearest regulator?
Legally enforce you how much water can go through your commode with each flush or what kind of lights you can use in your home?
Make choosing to not serve a particular customer for your business is a hate crime?
Fining (oh excuse me, “taxing”) you for not purchasing a particular product or service?
Decides that another private citizen is entitled to property you own because a city likes what he plans to do with the land compared to what you are currently doing with it?
Charges a rancher exorbitant fees for the privilege of drinking water and grazing on land that the rancher owns?
And then kills cattle that the rancher owns while sending in dozens of armed people to surround a family home in an effort to collect the debt?
When blue line special after blue line special creates a law enforcement system that knows it will never be held accountable as long as it keeps the peons in line?
Really? Are you another person that that lives in a nation that has does all this and a lot more, and then reads my tagline and says to himself; “Yep! Way too soon.”
I’m not anti-police. As one who has worked for local government for 25 years (and no, I will not have some golden parachute retirement) i have witnessed first hand the change in police officer personality from friend and unneighbors to entitled spoiled children who have perfected union thug tactics to increase their pay and benefits, flaunt the laws they are sworn to uphold, intimidate the citzens with gestapo like tactics, and then laugh about it all this back in the inner sanctum of the police station.
Look at any city or county budget and you will find that they average in the 70% range of all general fund expenses. If you try to cut budgets to control spending they file grievances and force the city in to mandatory arbitration to extract more funds. They claim all of this is for public safety and the detractors are soft on crime or trying to protect the bad guys. Just go into your local city hall and ask for payroll records and you will be shocked to learn that the highest paid employees are not the department managers eating from the government trough, but the overtime sucking hogs on the police force who are only in it for the money and power.
So now we get to see what species is created when an ostrich is bred with a sheep. And reap the consequences of their vote counting just as much as the ones cast by those that love their liberty as much or more than life itself...
Again, another response NOT to what I said, or what the op-ed said but more straw men. The op-ed is a cop-bashing op-ed. That’s all that it is.
Yeah, actually in your comment at #69 you made a nice use of sarcasm in response to the article that described the woman arrested while jogging because she could not hear them to obey their lawful commands...
The question still stands — how much more control are you willing to give the authorities before you say “Enough”? Depending on what goes on with my career over the next few months, I may be there pretty soon.
A government which empowers an agency that can determine at their whim that you now persona non grata in a profession you have spent 25 years, and done that acknowledging that you did not cause anyone harm, is not a government I can obey and support any longer. I must say that I am fortunate though — I did not get shot when I was putting up little resistance I could to their actions...
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