Normalizing The Police State (and how it ends with taser-firing drones)
By Allison Kilkenny article link
March 10, 2010 "True/Slant"
... A school in Pennsylvania is accused of covertly activating webcams in school-issued laptops to spy on students. The accusations have generated a lot of outrage, but this is the logical conclusion of the country’s general movement toward a police state. If the NSA can wiretap citizens’ phones, the FBI can infiltrate protest groups, and the police can generally dominate and suppress any kind of protest, why shouldn’t schools be able to monitor student activity?
Americans have already accepted forms of police brutality (macing, sound cannons, tasering) as the inevitable punishments for exercising their First Amendment rights. They have already submitted to the bureaucratic requirements of permits (permits to gather, permits to use a bullhorn,) and the ridiculous spectacle of caged protests where activists are literally penned behind gates and cannot move from their designated locations as they “exercise” their “freedom of speech.”
When the protest spills past the acceptable parameters of activism, the police state shocks the citizenry back into submission. They taser, and mace, and deafen people until they stop fighting. ...
... Here we have the completion of the perfect police state. Citizens are monitored from cradle to grave. Any signs of anger or rebellion are swiftly squelched with medication or “peace officers.” The schools step in when the state cannot act to monitor and regulate every movement of students’ lives under the banner of “Zero Tolerance.”
When the medicated and monitored children grow into dysfunctional adults, some of who eventually realize their shitty circumstances (complete with shitty healthcare, outsourced jobs, limited resources, poisoned environment, enormous wealth disparity, etc.) and they think about rebelling, they are immediately lassoed with an anchor of bureaucracy. Should you want to protest, please fill out form AYT0754 five months prior to said protest, and pay this fee, and remain in this pen, and please don’t make too much noise…
Those few brave souls that break through this wall and do manage to protest are put down at Stage 2 of the Police State with weaponry: mace, sound cannons, tasers, and whatever else the Pentagon desires to test on them. The state will only be too happy to use opiate weaponry next. What a nice, neat way to stop activism! Spray a little Happy in the herd’s face and watch them wander off, smiling.
Sinclair Lewis said, “When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.” I think people expect the end of America’s free society to look like a violent apocalyptic scene in some Hollywood film, but that’s not how it will happen. Government officials figured out that suppressing riots with bullets is bad PR. They have learned to do it quietly, and in a way where they can claim they’re being humane about the whole thing. Look! We don’t shoot people anymore! We taser them!
The end product is the same, though. Rebellion is suppressed. Activism is thwarted. ...
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