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!
Gee, wasn’t that one put out there by those “crazy old Birchers”?
Here’s one of MY favorites: “LOOKS LIKE THE BIRCHERS WERE RIGHT!”
I wouldn’t be surprised if he is shaking his fist from inside a gated community.
That’s the ignorance of the voters Franklin and Jefferson feared.
The evidence has been usurping the Spite House for 6 years!
Ping.
“The police do what the city administration tells them to do. The administration is responsible for the abuses of peoples’ rights.”
Oh yea. The old Nuremberg defense.
Folks, we’ve seen innumerable reports right here on FR of police excesses, corruption, and outright blatant support of the Leftist regime - to say nothing of the shiny new tacticool weapons.
To deny these events occur is foolhardy at best.
It’s a police-bashing op-ed. To deny that is foolhardy at best.
And it worked so well there.
It’s the truth and you deny it. Why is that?
Bad cops deserve to get bashed.
I do not completely disagree, but the courts have not helped at all (they are supposed to), and the people that got elected have kept pushing the ball further down the field into tyranny or at the very least, a system that our founders would declare to be tyranny. And do not forget about the amendment process, which has been good in some cases and horrible in others.
Without recognizing the holes in the document from 1789 and some of the ambiguities and fuzzy language that permitted things to get to where they are, any fix made (if any is indeed made) will be temporary.
It’s not the truth, so of course I deny it. This article is an anti-cop agitprop piece, and that’s all that it is. Go scream at people having brunch, you’ll fit right in.
+1 Like
Take me off your ping lists, ass!
The sad fact is...the people have been screaming for a police state without even realizing it. I am a police officer...23 years in. What constitutes police work has changed dramatically over that time. With the advent of cell phones...people can sit on their ass...call to have pizza delivered to them...call and order a movie to their tv...and call the police to tell the neighbor to turn music down or shut their barking dog up. All with out getting off their ass. The guys where I work..virginia ask each other all the time “how the hell is this a police matter?” The amount of paperwork and documenting is ridiculous...
Yea, and anti immigration types, too. Oh, wait, that is a smear. There are anti-bad cop FReepers, just like there are anti-illegal immigration FReepers.
We have to see the good and the bad in all situations.
I read a commentary by Peter Hitchens in the UK lamenting the fact that a solider being attacked by crazy Islamic killers can’t use weapons to defend himself, that civilians dressed up in heavy gear have to be deployed to do that.
It makes no sense.
The same thing happened at Fort Hood some years ago with the local police SWAT called in.
In Venezuela the “Leftist Regime” felt compelled ten years or so ago in the early days of what is now a disaster for that country to send national police around to local police stations to seize tactical weapons and shotguns leaving the locals with only pistols to deal with drug dealers and criminal gangs.
The police do a lot of good and they sometimes get hurt or killed for it.
Sometimes police do evil things, I always remember the SWAT team that stood guard and arrested people outside the building where Terri Schiavo died 10 years ago when Bushes (W and Jeb) were in power.
One day a few years ago a cop came to work one Saturday morning, then drove his patrol car into a wall along a highway I usually travel that time of day. The guy was suspected of drinking by his supervisor and tested well above the legal limit. He was fired.....
There’s good and bad with police, let’s keep it all in perspective and if I am driving over the speed limit today and get pulled over, then I deserve the consequences.
“The blacks are fighting back now”
The blacks are participating in communist led activities.
Then the Party of Lincoln had better get with the program or the communists will continue to dominate the discourse.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.