These episodes of park police doing this blockading and closing of even private properties have revealed something: the arrow of their loyalties points away from the people and toward the government.
If things go badly for the country, you might want to keep that in mind.
Personally, I think this was sort of a trial run.
However, that said, I think a lot of parkies (and I know some) are very devoted to the US and its people and honestly weren’t expecting anything like this and didn’t know how to react. I would also suspect that a lot of them didn’t think they were really going to be expected to enforce it and it was just for show.
Rangers always complain about being regarded as an enforcement arm, something that was not always true (although they had certain police powers) and actually developed more in recent years as there was more crime in parks. However, there is a separate United States Parks Police, which is armed and does most of the hard stuff and which is the one that appears in most of the recent photos of park closings, etc.
I notice that in some places Obama had to hire what was clearly contract labor to shut down the parks, so there may have been more resistance than we know about.
Also, this has rallied the States like nothing else, which is also something you don’t hear discussed.
When Obama did this, he wanted to punish average Americans, mostly Anglo whites but with a fair number of Hispanics and even some black Americans (judging by what I saw of the attendance this summer on a tour through various National Parks). He knew that anybody interested in this country and its history and even landscape would be no friend of his.
At least in Saddam's regime, they had the decency of covering their faces when they they tormented their neighbors and friends.
-PJ
You got that right. The old “we don’t make the laws, we just enforce them” will be the trump card of the day.