Not mine…
I once worked with a woman from Belarus. One day we were chatting about our respective educations and she dropped the bomb that all her classmates and friends were criminals.
I asked how that could be?
Her explanation rebooted my brain.
“The people in power, formerly Party Officials now part of the New Russian Mafia made laws that made everyone criminals”
She went on to explain that the laws making her friends criminals were enacted in response to her friends supporting the opposition party.
In other words if you ran against the old guard officials, supported candidates that were against the old guard or the mafia you were automatically a criminal and imprisoned.
I asked, “Didn’t the people object?”
She puffed out a cloud of smoke from her Marlboro with a smile “Sure, and they went to jail too. If anyone in their family objected their whole family went to jail. Their sisters and Mothers were raped and their Fathers & Brothers beaten and crippled.”
She said it so matter of fact it was so commonplace there wasn’t any emotional impact to her.
In my Amerocentric brain, I was trying to convince myself that this kind of thing could never happen here. Eventually I succeeded in convincing myself that all was well.
Our conversation was in 2000.
This is the kind of thing that scares the hell out of people like me. Because stuff like this happens all the time in various countries all over the world.
We believed it could never happen here!
My how things changed…
A mere 13 years, a few terrorists attacks, and 2 wars later, and we’re faced with the possibility that in fact it could happen here.
All it takes is fear.
All it takes is the belief that the ends justify the means.
All it takes is time. Time for the people to forget how things are supposed to be.
Our government tells us that they’re protecting us and to do that better they need to curtail just a few of our rights. We willingly give up those rights in the name of safety, even when the threats are not being removed.
How many people who are here on expired student visas has our government not hunted down? How many enemies of our country that we don’t know about are here?
How many more of our rights, how much more of the constitution will we allow to be thrown away?
California has recently taken steps toward exactly the situation in Belarus.
In past weeks California representatives have essentially tried to make people with a wide variety of firearms criminals. They’ve done this with the stroke of a pen.
Under The Patriot act and subsequent anti-terror acts, all it takes for you to be investigated, searched, wiretapped, detained, or imprisoned is for you to fall under a guideline that someone in Washington has decided means you’re a terrorist.
But as we move on we see that abuse of power is expanding.
From the Sargent in TX who was arrested because he was “Rudely” carrying a rifle in a rural area with his son. To the parents of a Maryland child whose home was searched after their child had spent 2 hours or more being interrogated in the principals office because the child had brought a cap-gun to school.
Sure, right now you say “well it’s about the guns.”
You’re thinking what about Sandy Hook?
We have to protect the children…
Remember this… There is no law in TX that says you can’t have your rifle slung over your shoulder. There is also no law against cap guns. The common thread is that in both cases the 2nd and 4th amendments were left trampled in the dirt.
But wait, it gets better.
There’s a guy on twitter who had his home searched because he’s a vocal critic of the Obama Administration. The Article is here
I want you to understand that I as a rule don’t like The Examiner.
In this case it was the only place I could find remnants of the original piece. I couldn’t locate Mr. Francois blog as of this writing. I was able to locate this article which quotes some of the blog piece I read a day or two ago.
Short version.
This guy is very critical of the Obama Administration.
He Tweets about it, blogs about it and generally gives his First Amendment right a workout. This led to his Fourth Amendment being stomped on.
He opens his door to people claiming to be the police but who were in fact the Secret Service. I suppose they are law enforcement, but I would have expected them to identify themselves properly in the first place.
They didn’t have a warrant, Mr. Francois granted them permission to “Have a look around” because he didn’t want his house trashed while they looked for something that wasn’t there. Besides they could have gotten a warrant with a phone call. As he points out, then they’d have been pissed and that would have made things worse.
As they leave, one of the SS agents says, “better stay in line”
Then after the secret service was done at his house, they went to his daughters.
This all because someone in power figured that the Constitution doesn’t really matter.
The First, Second, and Fourth amendments have all been violated by the examples listed in this short bit of writing.
Are we heading for a Police State?
Wikipedia defines Police State as;
“A police state is a state in which the government exercises rigid and repressive controls over the social, economic, and political life of the population. A police state typically exhibits elements of totalitarianism and social control, and there is usually little or no distinction between the law and the exercise of political power by the executive.
The inhabitants of a police state experience restrictions on their mobility, and on their freedom to express or communicate political or other views, which are subject to police monitoring or enforcement. Political control may be exerted by means of a secret police force which operates outside the boundaries normally imposed by a constitutional state.[2]“
Is any of this ringing a bell, Sounding familiar, Grabbing your attention? I hope to god we’re waking up. This isn’t a bad dream, it’s a bad reality and one that we need to stop.
We don’t want to see it, we don’t want to believe it. But it sure looks like our country is heading down a very dark road.
Our refusal to see it, is providing opportunity to those who have given us the recent spate of scandals all of which lead more or less right to capital hill.
Take this Saturday Morning to make your voice heard.
Please write your representatives. Let them know you’re not pleased with their performance, remind them that you can and will vote them out of office. (Perhaps we should vote them out of office anyway just for good measure) Put them in their place and remind these people 1) They work for us, 2) we’re watching them. and 3) we’re not going to take anymore.