• Police in a small Georgia town tasered a five-foot-two and 87-year-old woman who was using a kitchen knife to cut dandelions for use in a recipe. Police claim they had no choice but to taser the old woman, who does not speak English, but was smiling at police to indicate she was friendly, because she failed to comply with orders to put down the knife.
• In Alabama, police first tasered then shot and killed an unarmed man who refused to show his driver’s license after attempting to turn in a stray dog he’d found to the local dog shelter. The man’s girlfriend and their three children, all under the age of 10, witnessed the shooting.
• In New York, Customs and Border Protection officers have come under fire for subjecting female travelers, including minors, to random body searches that include strip searches while menstruating, genital-probing, forced pelvic exams, X-rays, and intravenous drugs at hospitals.
These are not isolated incidents.
These cases are legion.
It is what a state of undeclared martial law looks like, when you can be arrested, tasered, shot, brutalized, and in some cases killed merely for not complying with a government agent’s order, or not complying fast enough.
It isn’t just happening in crime-ridden inner cities.
It’s happening all across the country.
America has been locked down.
It is what it’s like to be a citizen of the American police state.
It is what it’s like to be an enemy combatant in your own country.
It is what it feels like to be a conquered people.
It is what it feels like to be an occupied nation.
It is what it feels like to live in fear of armed men crashing through your door in the middle of the night, or to be accused of doing something you never even knew was a crime, or to be watched all the time, your movements tracked, your motives questioned.
It is what it feels like to have your homeland transformed into a battlefield.
We the people have now come full circle, from being held captive by the British police state to being held captive by the American police state.
Where we went wrong was in allowing ourselves to become enthralled with and then held hostage by a military empire in bondage to a corporate state, the very definition of fascism.
Unfortunately, we find ourselves scrambling for a foothold as our once rock-solid constitutional foundation crumbles beneath us. No longer can we rely on the president, Congress, the courts, or the police to protect us from wrongdoing.
Indeed, the president, Congress, the courts, and the police have come to embody all that is wrong with the United States.
Certainly, the U.S. Constitution’s safeguards against police abuse means nothing when government agents can crash through doors, terrorize children, shoot dogs, and jail anyone on any number of trumped of charges, and those involved have little say in the matter.
There is no end to the government’s unmitigated gall in riding roughshod over the rights of the citizenry, whether in matters of excessive police powers, militarized police, domestic training drills, SWAT team raids, surveillance, property rights, overcriminalization, roadside strip searches, profit-driven fines, and prison sentences.
The president can direct the military to detain, arrest, and secretly execute American citizens. These are the powers of an imperial dictator, not an elected official bound by the rule of law. This mantle is worn by whomever occupies the Oval Office, now, and in the future.
A representative government means nothing when the average citizen has little to no access to their elected officials, while corporate lobbyists enjoy a revolving door relationship with everyone from the president on down. Indeed, although members of Congress hardly work for the taxpayer, they work hard at being wooed by corporations, which spend more to lobby our elected representatives than we spend on their collective salaries.
As for the courts, long since have ceased being courts of justice. Instead, they have become courts of order, largely marching in lockstep with the government’s dictates, all the while helping to increase the largesse of government coffers. It’s called for-profit justice, and it runs the gamut of all manner of financial incentives in which the courts become cash cows for communities looking to make an extra buck.
As for the rest, the schools, the churches, private businesses, service providers, non-profits and your fellow citizens, many are marching in lockstep with the police state.
It is what is commonly referred to as community policing.
After all, the police can’t be everywhere. So how do you police a nation when your population outnumbers your army of soldiers? How do you carry out surveillance on a nation when there aren’t enough cameras, let alone viewers, to monitor every square inch of the country 24/7? How do you not only track, but analyze the transactions, interactions and movements of every person within the United States?
The answer is simpler than it seems: You persuade the citizenry to be your eyes and ears.
It’s a brilliant ploy, with the added bonus that although the citizenry remains focused on and distrustful of each other, they’re incapable of focusing on more definable threats that fall closer to home, namely, the government and its militarized police.
It may be that we have nothing to worry about.
Perhaps the government really does have our best interests at heart.
Perhaps covert domestic military training drills really are just benign exercises to make sure our military is prepared for any contingency.
Then again, although I don’t believe in worrying over nothing, there can be no denying that we’re being accustomed to life in a military state.
The malls may be open for business, the baseball stadiums may be packed, and the news anchors may be twittering nonsense about the latest celebrity foofa, but those are just distractions from what is really taking place: The transformation of America into a war zone.
I document in my book, “Battlefield America: The War on the American People,” if it looks just like a battlefield (armored tanks on the streets, militarized police in metro stations, surveillance cameras everywhere), sounds like a battlefield (SWAT team raids nightly, sound cannons to break up large assemblies of citizens), and acts like a battlefield (police shooting first and asking questions later, intimidation tactics, and involuntary detentions), it is a battlefield.
—The Rutherford Institute