That brought up a surprising number of websites where people are pondering what has gone wrong in America.
I only read a few of them. I thought the one titled America Has Become a Fascist Police State by Carl Gibson made some interesting points.
The first five paragraphs from America Has Become a Fascist Police State...
George Orwell's "1984" wasn't meant to be an instruction manual.
One word that emerged from the novel was the word "doublespeak," where truth is deliberately obfuscated through clever wording. In some cases, the meaning of a word is reversed entirely. Oceania, the totalitarian regime in Orwell's book, used doublespeak as a matter of course. The Ministry of Truth specialized in propaganda. The Ministry of Love was a secretive torture complex.
In the early years of public school, or in public addresses by politicians, America is touted as the Land of the Free, or the Land of Opportunity, or the Greatest Country on Earth. We're taught from near-infancy that this country was founded on the right to say what you want, whenever, wherever, to whomever. We're told we have the freedom to assemble peacefully, to petition our leaders for a redress of grievances. We're taught that if you're apprehended by the law, you have the right to a fair trial and legal representation.
Yet, today we live in a country where government aids the corporate takeover of elections. Here, banks who fraudulently took Americans' homes for profit can get bailed out by the taxpayers, and use the money to pay themselves 12-figure bonuses. This is a country where even US citizens can be detained without due process, tortured, and even assassinated overseas.
Today, in the Land of the Free, nonviolent political protesters using their First Amendment rights to speak out against all of the above can be beaten, tasered, and maced by heavily-militarized police forces, using military-grade equipment, without any provocation.
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The 15 year old kid who shot the video that went viral which has led to international outrage, is a white kid, friends with the black kids being pushed around by the out of control cop. The 15 year old knew what he was witnessing was wrong, that it was his black friends being targeted, not him or his other white friends.
Whatever went on before what we saw in that video does not justify, which some are claiming, the behavior of the Bad Cop.
Pulling a gun on two little kids?
Little kids who were obviously upset seeing their friend manhandled by what appeared to be an out of his mind Bad Cop. I know my impulse when I saw what that Bad Cop was doing to that girl was to knock him off the girl and beat him up.
Do these kids have valid reason to fear cops? Of course they do. Did they have the right to try and run away from the cops? Of course they do.
No crime had been committed.
What gives the cop the right to yell at kids to get their asses on the ground, and then accost them when they don't obey his orders? In the chaos that the Bad Cop created who knows what the kids heard. They appeared to be terrified.
The Nazis were big on orders that must be followed. If a Gestapo Storm Trooper ordered you to get face down on the ground you had better do so, or get shot. The Soviet Union, at its worst, same thing.
How did it come to this in America? Orders must be followed, including laying face down on the ground, or a bullet may be fired at you.
America's cops need to find a different way to defuse a possible dangerous situation other than shooting to kill. How about shooting to render the person no longer a threat? Like a shot to the leg, not the head. or heart. And how about never shooting when there is no weapon in play?
I know most cops are good cops, that the nutjobs are a small minority. But, the nutjob Bad Cops need to go. There is no excuse for that McKinney Bad Cop's behavior. What we saw on the video should have been enough to get him immediately fired and then charged with some sort of assault charge for manhandling that young girl.
In various social media you read people defending the Bad Cop. They come across like fascists to me. The majority commenting, though, come across as good people who know a bad thing when they see it.
And want something done about it....
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