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Sparks Tribune 4/27/08 I must admit that I hold a particularly suspicious attitude to government in general and police powers in the particular, most particularly when they involve tactical raids by heavily armed squads of black clad super troopers from half a dozen cooperating agencies of the "law and order industrial complex". Any cursory reading of history documents the police as tools of government policy and politics begin in the labor struggles of the nineteenth century. From the strike busting squads of the time, through the anti immigrant "riots" of the 1920’s, to the use of police provocateurs against anti war marchers, and the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, big police operations have mostly been one or another unconstitutional attack on groups whose ideals or practices offend the surrounding society or administration. I am already adjusted to the continuing denial of basic rights, as they were understood in America of earlier times. I have even come to terms with the idea that my nation is rapidly becoming a fascist state with global imperial ambitions. It happens to every powerful state and sooner or later the rooting of homebound chickens brings them low. The trick is learning how to survive as Italians after the fall of Rome. Like most Americans I had become inured to the slow erosion of liberty and individual freedom and only considered the issue in the abstract or in some specific outrage against the innocent, such as the pot laws. But that was last month. That was when I still believed there were some limits on the terrorist actions of my government and its armed minions. That was when I thought that Americans would never allow the neo nazi raids on peaceful communities of religious zealots on rumor and gossip, drag families from their homes to mass detention camps and separate the children from their mothers. Now I know better! This is not about multiple marriage, or the practice of marrying young women off as soon as they reach childbearing age, abhorrent though the practice may seem to the outside world. This is about government as terrorist. This as about using armored personnel carriers with .50 caliber machine guns and SWAT teams with automatic weapons to force women and kids onto busses for removal to crowded imprisonment with only the clothes on their backs. By what arrogation of powers do the authorities take such actions? Who gave the police the idea that they could do such things, with impunity and immunity? Our constitution protects us as individuals. Habeas Corpus, the 4th amendment and the rues of evidence in criminal cases all restrain the dogs of duty from abusing the citizenry, more or less, but there are no such protections from the do-gooder bureaucracy ,where no warrants are needed for the "Child Protective Gestapo" who have now taken control of the four hundred sixteen children kidnapped under color of authority from their sheltered lives of religious practice and retreat from the evil society that could do this to them. In my youth the question was: how the Germans, a civilized and advanced people, could allow themselves to become the monsters of modern times. Now, as I watch Texas and all of America standing passively by, I know the answer. |
