Waking Up to A Different World

The world has changed this morning in America.

It's taken a few days to sink in, but this is not the same country.

I know, there were worse times, when black men were lynched in the South, when signs appeared in windows of stores in Boston: No Irish Need Apply, when witches were burned in Salem, when young men from the American heartland were dying in the rice paddies of Vietnam, when the flower of American youth was sent off to die in the trenches in France for no good reason, when slaves were sold and beaten and murdered. This is a country drenched in blood and hypocrisy and this is a country where power gets entrenched and exacts its pound of flesh.

Yes, there was Senator Joseph McCarthy, who was followed by adoring masses in his phony search for Communists in the government.

Yes, there is the moronic Sarah Palin and the seething Rush Limbaugh.
But you could always say, well, there will always be fringe crazies.

But in my lifetime at least, there has not been a time when the Supreme Court has been so brazenly a force of suppression of the weak and powerless and a tool of the powerful and wealthy.

But when you look at that Supreme Court, you see we have a new Dred Scott Supreme Court, one which can look at the most egregious oppressors and find only sympathy for the forces of order and punishment.

This is a court which would, if we had slavery today, embrace it as important for maintaining order.

Today we wake up and know if our sisters or daughters or wives are arrested for jaywalking or for littering or pulled over for a broken tail light and brought to jail, they can be strip searched, told to squat and cough, have their orifices probed, all by order of the Supreme Court of the United States.

And these are people who have not been tried, not been found guilty of anything.

Merely arrested.

And is there an outcry from the populace over this incendiary ruling?

We have seen powers which would make the Gestapo blush, and are there protests in the street or in Boston harbor?

Are plans made, options discussed for removing the usurpers?

No. We are, it must be admitted, a nation of sheep.

We claim to be heirs to the founding fathers--to Franklin and Jefferson and Adams. They would gasp at our indolence, our torpor, our inertia. They would be ashamed of the people we have become.

We will allow our loved ones to be led to the slaughter and we'll turn on American Idol or some hockey game.

It won't me, not my daughter. They only do that to Black guys or terrorists.

There was a great scene in Band of Brothers, where Private David Webster points his service .45 in the face of a baker in a village which was just outside a concentration camp. The baker claims he didn't know what went on in the concentration camp.
"Didn't know?" Webster sputters. "It's less than half a mile away. When the winds shifted you had to smell it from here!"
That's where we are today, just outside the concentration camp.
We know it's there, but we don't want to smell it.