And you think you live in America……isn’t that cute…

Today in my daily tea-drinking/investigate-the-world’s-surprises morning ritual I came across this video showing the Denver Sheriff’s Dept.’s facility they’re planning on using for the upcoming Democratic National Convention. To keep arrested protesters in, that is.

Something to note – The protesters have a constitutional RIGHT TO PROTEST. From the Florida ACLU Website –

It is probably no accident that freedom of speech is the first freedom mentioned in the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” The Constitution’s framers believed that freedom of inquiry and liberty of expression were the hallmarks of a democratic society.

The way they get around this is by changing the definition of “peaceful” into basically standing silently in these walled off FREE SPEECH ZONES and anything else they do outside of that gets them gassed, beaten and arrested.

From the FREE SPEECH ZONES link above –

Free speech zones have been used at a variety of political gatherings. The stated purpose of free speech zones is to protect the safety of those attending the political gathering, or for the safety of the protesters themselves. Critics, however, suggest that such zones are “Orwellian”,[1][2] and that authorities use them in a heavy-handed manner to censor protesters by putting them literally out of sight of the mass media, hence the public, as well as visiting dignitaries. Though authorities generally deny specifically targeting protesters, on a number of occasions, these denials have been contradicted by subsequent court testimony. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has filed, with various degrees of success and failure, a number of lawsuits on the issue.

The level of intimidation, control, and eventual deterrence inherent in the construction and use of such facilities speaks quite loudly to the idea that Free Speech is “free” only to those that can pay for it, and only if it’s sanctioned by the Corporate Controlled Government.

I’m disgusted that the takeover manifests itself in this way. While obviously NOT the worst trait of the takeover, it’s one of the most flagrantly Anti-American ways that Power demonstrates it’s power, and it’s crude mechanisms of control and silencing dissent speak to almost barbaric levels of criminality and arrogance.

I can’t understand why so many people in this country allow and even agree with these tactics. They call themselves Americans but they’re not willing support even the most basic and powerful concepts that DEFINE what America is, (assuming you agree the Constitution is a good and powerful document on which to base a country’s government. If you don’t think it is, well, it’s good for you that the Constitution protects your right to think the Constitution sucks), and instead enable things like this to occur.

So before I completely freakout, here’s the report on this Denver Cage Facility

Why giving this much power away without oversight is bad.

Watch this, and then understand that part of why these cops act like this is the sense that they are becoming THE power, and are not beholden to it. This kind of thing is what we’ll see more and more of as the rights of citizens are taken away and the oversight mechanisms taken down and we get more and more very poorly trained yet quite powerful in their sphere people dealing with the public. It’s inevitable and has been shown time and time and time again in history.

I’m not saying that this was a political attack by the way, nor am I saying that this kind of thing doesn’t happen quite a bit, it does (sadly), I’m saying that this kind of abuse will become more commonplace if these wild changes to our security procedures continue to be farmed out to private corporations who have NO motive to hire professionals who are well trained and have civilian oversight. And even then, these cops are pretty well trained people in general, yet look what they do. It’s nuts to think that your average McDonalds hiring reject isn’t going to start doing this kind of stuff, just silly…..

Link to the video, (it’s got a coupla REALLY bad moments, be warned!).

Voted for Bush? Then man up and own it. Seriously.

Ok, I’ve had it with this crap.

If you voted for Bush, it’s time stop it now, you can’t hide from it, you can’t explain it away, you can’t avoid the truth…..IT’S GONE TO SHIT RIGHT IN YOUR FACE, and it’s no one’s fault but your own!

Period.

You folks are always talking about personal responsibility, well take some now, because this one’s on YOU. We didn’t vote this guy in, (of course, you have to factor in the election farce that the Supreme Court pulled on us, he probably WASN’T actually voted in, but somebody got him close enough to pull it off) YOU FOLKS DID, and you need to stop running around that truth.

Clinton didn’t do this (though he was FAR from the perfect president, I’ll agree with you on that one), the liberal media (now THERE’S a giant pile of bull, the media couldn’t be more right and right center if they were paid to be….oh wait….) didn’t do this – in fact they stood by and watched with their hands in their pockets while this whole mess grew into the malignant cancer we’ve now got to have radical surgery to cure, (and the prognosis isn’t great….).

I’ll also admit the Democrats didn’t do much to stop this, but then again I’ve never been one to make a distinction between Democrats and Republicans….as far as I can tell they are both taking HUGE sums of money from the institutions that are the real root of the problem – the giant corporations who have essentially taken control of our government…..

Let’s remember, it’s OUR government, not an extension of Corporate Will, (although it’s becoming de facto that it is indeed just that), but it’s only ours if we decide to participate in it.

Democracy only works when people are interested and educated about the present world, (something that has been disappearing as the corporate media downsizes all news and expands further and further into cheap and easy opinion and hysterical shrieking about non-issues that make people’s blood boil for 30 seconds until the next hysterically shrieking voice grabs their attention and they begin to lose focus and become exhausted and demoralized by everything they think they’re supposed to give a damn about) and then they DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT! A leadership body tends to respond to the voices they hear the most, and nowadays the voices they hear the most are the ones that are paid 24/7/365 to be in their faces screaming, and that is the corporate army of lawyers, lobbyists and congressional aides that have been placed in Washington to make sure their voice is louder than the People’s could ever be.

When Bush crept into the the back door of the White House at midnight on a dark and moonless night, I was extremely vocal about what I thought he was going to do, and the reaction I got from people on the Right was profound and vicious in the extreme. But nothing compared to what happened after 9/11, I began to predict and speak out about the very things that have now (after these intervening years) come to pass……and WOW!

The backlash I received in those times was to some degree understandable, people were scared, they wanted everyone on board to protect us, they couldn’t believe such a thing could happen in their nice neat lives, and anyone who wasn’t totally on board was scary and hard to understand….I get that.

But the intensity of hate, the anger and fear, the threats and the insults, the censoring and deletion of website profiles/posts/comments, the emails, the taunts at gigs, the phone calls….etc etc etc…..I made people very scared/angry/abusive with my thoughts and words, and that made them nasty. VERY NASTY indeed…..

But now, after all that has come to light, and everything that has changed about America and it’s place in the world, the revelations of criminality, the lies, the manipulations to and of War, the gigantic failures of Katrina/Iraq/our economy/the the vicious polarization of the “United” States, the blatant re-writing of the Constitution, the ignoring of all laws inconvenient to total presidential takeover, after all these things why keep behaving like this? Why the anger, why the continued hate and vilification, why NOT admit you just plain got it wrong?

You were wrong, that’s all. It happens……

Yeh, maybe in the long term this is going to go down as the biggest fuckup that could ever be made in human history, yeh maybe the fallout from this could possibly mean the end of real democracy not only in this country but in the world for the foreseeable future, and yeh it could mean that the planet is going to punish us big time for our transgressions…..all that could be true.

But still, it’s just a mistake, that’s all. So why not just man up and admit it? Apologize for the mess, and start cleaning it up, like any grownup would do?

I think I have the answer.

It’s about taking personal responsibility for the way they have treated people. They know that if they admit they were wrong, that would mean they would have to accept responsibility for the way they treated people who disagreed with them, the extreme and horrendous ways that they abused their fellow countrymen and others, all because those countrymen simply exercised their right, even responsibility, to speak out. Speak out against that which it has since been proven, we had right.

These folks can’t accept that they were simply WAY out of line, and they can’t admit they were and are still wrong because of it. The treatment they dished out was extreme and inexcusable, and they don’t want to have to “take it back”, because of what it will say about them as people.

It will say that they are capable of being wrong on such a scale that it would call into question every choice they ever make in the future. It will say that they can be ruled by their emotions,not logic and the facts. Worst of all it will say that they are the kind of people who can be scared into becoming part of the lynch mob, that they are capable of being the ones throwing the stones at the children till they are dead, that they will punish innocence when it disagrees, and that they can do all this while being dead wrong.

That’s a hard place to find one’s self in, I’ll admit. I’m glad I’m not there. But I’m where I am because of my choices, and they are where they are because of theirs.

So what about personal responsibility now? Should there be retribution on some level, some kind of responding punishment that equals what they have done……or something different?

For me, I’d like to pursue a different path. I’d like to forgive and move forward with my countrymen and the world, I’d like to learn from this and allow others to do the same….nothing teaches like being wrong and then finding out that you’ll have to reassess things you truly believed in, but more importantly, nothing teaches like having to say you’re sorry.

But I have a condition. You WILL have to say you’re sorry.

You have behaved poorly, and you need to face it. I won’t rub your face in it, I won’t hold it up in your face for the rest of your life, but you need to own it. Then we can agree to disagree sometimes, and we can move forward to solutions, and maybe we can pull back from the edge, maybe. It will take all of us to pull it off if we are to succeed.

I’d like to forgive you….and maybe you need to forgive yourselves as well.

The funniest thing I’ve read for awhile –

Here.