By Sherwood Ross, OpEd News
07 February 12
[REPRINT]
ou
know you live in a police state when the president orders the
assassination (i.e., murder) of American citizens without bothering to
arrest them and bring them to trial. You know you live in a police state
when police forces across the country attack unarmed and non-violent
citizen protesters with pepper spray and clubs.
You know you live in a police state when the president
allows the military to continuously harass a prisoner against whom no
crime has been proven by interrupting him every five minutes of the day
to ask him, "Are you okay?" and forces him to stand to attention naked
at roll call. What it can do to one man it can do to every man.
You know you live in a police state when said prisoner
is barred from exercising in his cell and told where he may and may not
put his hands when he goes to sleep at night. Only a police state would
dictate how an individual can sleep.
You know you live in a police state when the
government punishes, rather than honors, whistle-blowers who reveal its
crimes such as the U.S. massacre of civilians in Baghdad that Bradley
Manning exposed.
You know you live in a police state when wardens force
pregnant women prisoners to deliver their babies while in chains. (Not
exactly "the new birth of freedom" of which Abraham Lincoln spoke.)
You know you live in a police state when the president
orders the assassination (i.e., murder) of American citizens without
bothering to arrest them and bring them to trial.
You know you live in a police state when police forces
across the country attack unarmed and non-violent citizen protesters
with pepper spray and clubs.
You know you live in a police state when hundreds of
thousands of citizens are rotting in prisons for victimless "crimes"
such as smoking pot and your country leads the world in incarcerations
with 2.3 million behind bars and when hundreds of thousands of these
prisoners are sexually assaulted.
You know you live in a police state when working
people who say overwhelmingly that they want to join a union cannot do
so for fear of being fired, and in which the money earned by the poor is
taken by the state and given to the rich. If the government can rob one
person, it can rob every person.
You know you live in a police state when your
government makes terrible, punishing wars on small countries after
falsely accusing them of having a "weapon of mass destruction" while it
possesses tens of thousands of them.
You know you live in a police state when the president
signs into law an Act allowing him to arrest innocent citizens on his
say-so and have the military imprison them indefinitely without charge,
legal counsel, or trial before a jury of their peers.
You know you live in a police state when you can be
barred from flying in an airliner on suspicion of "terrorism" that has
not been proven and which is impossible for you to challenge.
You know you live in a police state when you are under
surveillance by Federal agencies such as the FBI, Department of
Homeland Security, and the Central Intelligence Agency, among others,
for your political views rather than the commission of any crime against
the state, and when said agencies can access your medical records, bank
statements, and "private" papers, tap your telephone, question your
neighbors and employer and follow you around.
You know you live in a police state when the military
gets the biggest percentage of your tax dollars so that it can spend as
much for war as the next 20 nations combined while claiming it is
attacking other countries in the name of peace and order.
You know you live in a police state when the Pentagon
has more than a trillion dollars in research projects underway to make
sophisticated killing machines that will give it control of the entire
planet from 2,000 military bases and outer space and to terrify the
world with its arsenals of nuclear weapons and germ warfare.
You know you live in a police state when people write
to you to commend you for your "courage" for writing critically against
the government when, in fact, you should have every good reason to live
in fear of so doing.
Sherwood Ross has worked as a publicist for
Chicago; as a reporter for the Chicago Daily News and workplace
columnist for Reuters. He has also been a media consultant to colleges,
law schools, labor unions, and to the editors of more than 100 national
magazines. A civil rights activist, he was News Director for the
National Urban League, a talk show host at WOL Radio, Washington, D.C.,
and holds an award for "best spot news coverage" for Chicago radio
stations for civil rights reporting. He is the author "Gruening of
Alaska,"(Best Books)and several plays about Japan during World War II,
including "Baron Jiro," and "Yamamoto's Decision," read at the National
Press Club, where he is a member. His favorite quotations are from the
Sermon on The Mount.
