Posts Tagged ‘police state’

(Hat-tip to the Earthbound Misfit!)

So many of us have been shocked by videos of police doing terrible and illegal things that now several states are legislating to make that impossible. Apparently, they think it is easier to HIDE behind a law making taking pictures of on duty officers ILLEGAL than making their cops behave in law-abiding ways.

Freedom of the press much? Time to use hard to notice little cameras and never let your name be associated, I would say! I want to see how this plays when they arrest a camera man from a major news organization.
Attention to this, folks: Keep up!

I am boring myself lately.  It seems the war has fallen even further out of the news in the rush to watch well-aged adults act like children while pursuing life in a really ugly large house.  Yeah, yeah, I know it isn’t for the White House….but I will let that rant go.  The current resident has pretty much reneged on any responsibility to finish his mess in Iraq and Afghanistan; and the next applicants are soft pedaling how they will do it.

But I was thinking today, as I walked the dog in the marsh; I often fall into poetic reveries there.  Today, under a blue sky, all about me seemed black, red, and shades of desert tan.  The marsh grass was no longer golden to me, but faded desert tan and my mood was black.  The red dogwood branches seem to drip blood for dew in the sunlight.  The water at roadside is so black and foreboding that you expect the LOR special effects crew to come implant pale faces there.  I search the landscape of the marsh and the interior territory of my mind for the reason for my gloom.

You see, several years back, we had this war.  We went to the “rescue” of Kuwait and beat the nasty Iraqis back across their border.  It was a cheap war, in money and in American blood.  Not a lot of red, either on bandages or ledger pages.  And the war ended in black—-not too expensive in cash or casualties, just burnt bodies of fleeing enemies on a sooty highway.  America recoiled a bit, I mean, it isn’t everyday you see stuff that wouldn’t pay off on a movie screen.  But all in all, it was a happy war for America—very little American red was spilt and the black oil did flow.  It was over so fast they barely needed to paint machines or dress men in desert tan.

This war has been a world of different.  We are in the red in so many ways that the mind boggles, the press and President lie, and such angry confusion reigns that those cats all gray at night may not even BE cats.  A lot more red blood from America has been poured out on Iraqi and Afghani sands.  Not so much, granted, as in the desperately  massive battles of World War II, or in the police actions of Korea and Viet Nam; but an awful lot for what should have been a splendid little military adventure.  And the ledger sheets on this war?  Oh…oh, now THERE is red in even more profusion.  The grandchildren of the shattered veterans will not see those bills paid off.   The money just spurts out like arterial spray—and the desert tan is everywhere in new uniforms and body armor that is never quite enough.  And then, in black for Blackwater, too.  They are SUCH an expensive non-Army.

The Army now sometimes seems merely a training tool for guys who like that sort of life, but like it better for contractor pay than Army patriot pay.  And it keeps the U.S. checkbook overdrawn, yet the war is not won.  The black oil is not flowing and the red stain of death, destruction, despair and deterioration spreads like the eclipse across the face of this week’s full moon.

And like the red of the eclipse, which plunged the world into the blackest of winter nights, the red of this war is sending America into the black.  Not the black of financial solvency, no, into a black of uncertain futures and fears.  Into a black of increasing government purview of our lives, into the black of police brutality and a climate of fear, into a paranoia only other countries hated world-wide can appreciate and understand.  Into a night of neo-medieval religious sensibilities (though there is nothing sensible about it!) and calls for religiously repressive government measures.  Into the black of a democracy dying as a minority of plutocrats seize the reigns of power and use the military might of America as their personal mercenary force to “get theirs” before their greed puts out the lights of what once was called Western Civilization.

Because there is nothing civilized about where we are bound on our own ashy road with no signposts reading “Redemption” in spite of the religious garb used to hide the controlling hands reaching for ever more power.  The nation slowly freezes under high fuel prices and body searches at airports (and soon, train stations), the home improvements seem aimed at securing your “nest” so you never need set social foot outside again.  Right before Rome fell, did you know, country villas became little fortresses of comfort and security for the rich.  Their minions could fight off hungry hordes; but gave nothing back to the nation.

I tried, this morning, to remind myself that the tan marsh grass will soon sprout spring green.  But I am very afraid it is the only thing that will have a flush of hope: America is headed into the dark, and at night, even blood is black.  And I don’t know how long it will take for an American Renaissance to begin or what Enlightenment will be sufficient.