Through the ages the role of historians were to account for events leading to the present. We have looked far into our own personal pasts to explain and interpret the reasons why we do things the way we do things today. I am no different.
I seem to be in a feedback loop or in a circumstance where I keep getting sucked back into an atmosphere where the US military rules by encampment and through occupying forces.
After years of glowering at my computer screen, playing watchdog and blogger hack pitching endless Op-Eds, painting authorities with outrage, I was finally encouraged to write that which refused to write itself. This would be the text about what it was like to spend two years as a minor child civilian in a military dictatorship engineered by the US government.
I was simply born into the family of USAF officer. There was no "choice". In fact the dissolution of the concept was completely encouraged. It was routine for a parent to scream in my face at full gale that no one would ever pay me to think. As if the concept were as blasphemous as defecating on a church doorstep.
The truth of the matter outside my household was that there were plenty of people paid to think. They are opinion editors, writers, authors, pundits, policy advisors, think tank analysts and strategists. My parents seem to live in a world where the thoughts were not thought by them. They were thought by someone else who was better than them. Someone who had more power than them. They got power and relevance by executing orders to perfection. That was the source of their relevance and function.
I really didn't fit in my household for those reasons. Whether anyone liked it or not I still had thoughts, would think and would compose a thought, initiate discussions and engage in debate over concepts. Ideas were some of the items where very harsh words were exchanged and as my physical stature grew - they eventually became a point of physical challenge in my family.
President Barack Obama signed a bill or an Executive Order giving the US military permissions to indefinitely detain anyone for anything - and most certainly opposition. The military does not like challengers. People who oppose arbitrary detention, murder, rape and acts of brutality by way of war cause are their enemy.
Obama made the mistake of passing this bill. It now manufactures a creepy mill of thought criminals and bores a deep well of enmity between those born to this nation and those who rule by military force in this nation. Here are your seeds for civil war and class war. Think of a civic US storm which has been unmatched in US history. This was engineered by an overindulged National Security state which can find no other unique way to busy itself or to be usefullly justified except in wartime.
Bad and dark times are ahead, if Obama's advisors keep casting their lots against the 6th Amendment & the American people. This would provide for a military justice system which would trump the jurisdiction of State and national laws. Not to mention, it may nullify or cast the US Justice Department in a competitive light. The military doesn't like opposition, so this may make targets of any US Supreme Court Justice and essentially the entire 3rd branch of government for citing the Constitution to uphold the Rule of Law.
I expect that it won't be tomorrow that US soldiers show up at shopping malls. DHS just happens to already be on the scene, so it's plausible. It may or may not be a couple of months before humvee envoys start rolling through downtown financial districts during lunch hours to ensure the security of the area. It won't be today or tomorrow maybe that ballistics ranges are erected around select tennis courts and outdoor park areas for run throughs and tests. The military still has bases in most States and they will probably use those areas the most.
The great big "tell" if there is one, is by way of conventional electronic media- the computer generated news tickers and EAS alerts at the bottom of the screens. It will indicate a color or code name for a curfew, citing the times when you can and can't leave your homes to shop, work or travel around town for reasons of personal security.
How these ticker occurances become frequent intruders into your way of life and whether or not you heed them will demonstrate what side of military law you sit on. Your role will be to obey their orders when their orders are to shoot anyone coming in and out of an area. Otherwise you will not survive.
How I discovered the US military had the capability of limiting my freedoms was when I was transported to the 3rd world Republic of Panama.
There are all kinds of myths and misconceptions about this nation which I find hard to reconcile to this day. Panama was a nation in a great deal of turmoil and trouble and probably still is to this day. It was very hard to forget how we could ever make it better at all. It was a very special place which deserved independence, but the thought crawling around inside my mind the entire time was the most basic: why are we here at all?
THE MUSHROOM TREATMENT
And indeed I confronted the National Security excuse everyone else gets. It was for my father's work in the Special Warfare development unit for the army. That and "field testing jungle goggles" were about as far as I got. I became familiar with a common complaint concerning The Mushroom Treatment.
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