Living in America is a wonderful thing if you are lucky enough (for lack of a better qualifier) to have access to money and never get in the cross hairs of the police.

It is an idyllic world where there is abundance.

Money can get you pretty much anything in America. And even if you are not be happy at least you’ll be sad a lot more comfortably.

And the police will leave you alone as long as you don’t get noticed. You will experience a wonderful freedom without any large scale corruption or danger.

The only problem is that we are not perfectly bland mannequins and thus there is a chance you will get noticed.

Once the police notice you and you are unfortunate enough to be sucked into their grip there is no end to the absolute powerlessness you can experience.

Lets say you accidentally run a stop sign while driving. Or you forget to go for a walk with your ID and just happen to appear suspicious. Or it may be something more serious.

Whatever it is once you are in the grip of the police you no longer are in control of your life. They control you. It is a very scary feeling.

There is no check or balance to the interaction. They rule it. The police now treat the population are a hostile enemy at war. When they walk up to a car, any car, they have their hands on their guns. Every person is considered a potential dangerous assassin.

Why is it that the police need to act like that? I interact with hundreds of people a day and have yet to find one who has threatened my life. I’m certainly an easier target than an armed and trained police officer.

But then again I don’t go around behaving like police officers. The best way to get a dog to bite you is to kick it.

The US is a strange duality. One minute you may be walking along in the land of the free. And another you may be face down on the sidewalk in a bone breaking arm lock because they stopped you and you were stupid enough to argue with their logic.

Some people say we live in a police state and others point out all the liberties we have as refutation. But in my opinion we have both. As long as you follow the rules you have total liberty. If you don’t then the consequences are brutal.

That may be great as long as the rules are good ones. But rules are made by people and people are not perfect.

How about the rule that you can be kept without legal counsel if arrested under the suspicion of terrorism. The police have no obligation to cooperate with your family or a lawyer. You can disappear until they decide to make you reappear.

That is a great rule when stopping a terrorist from blowing up a building. But it is pretty sucky for the vast majority of people who get arrested under this rule and are completely innocent. It destroys their lives. There are thousands of people being held under these conditions right now. They in turn have families whose lives have also been ripped apart.

I question the logic here.

On the one hand the US government feels justified to perform genocidal campaigns against whole nations, then they use the animosity that these actions create to justify their “defensive anti-terrorist” rules and activities that are just as bad as their original actions.

Basically it is a circle where the US aggressively hurts people who get angry and in return want to hurt the US. Then under the pretense of “defense” the US justifies hurting more people.

It is pure stupidity. It is a low level of awareness that is narrow minded and ignorant.

Tags: American society, control mechanisms, police power

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 14th, 2008 at 11:13 pm and is filed under Society. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.