Freedom isn't free. And it isn't safe, either.

I won't win any friends for saying this, but I am ashamed of my country today. That we should be so quickly reduced to cowering in our homes, so happy to see armored trucks and SWAT Team-style para-military police squads roaming all over a town, so willing to comply meekly in the face of overwhelming force, is shocking to me. These are not the actions of a free people. This should not be response of a free state. It looks perilously close to a totalitarian police state, to me.

I see these scenes, and I think, "Kittens, we are being conditioned."

In watching the highly militarized police response to the Boston bombings and the massive manhunt for one piece of shit 19 year old boy, which has now effectively shut down an entire area, I cannot help but wonder if this is an instance of not letting a crisis go to waste, to use our dear Mr. Emanuel's famous phrase.

Only in America could this happen and we all still think we're the "Land of the Free."

Kittens, we are being conditioned.

While I fully understand the second-by-second potential for more death and bloodshed in an unstable and rapidly unfolding situation, I can't see scenes like these and not be sharply aware of the greater danger in a police force that could put together this kind of response over the escape of a single 19 year old kid, scared, on the run, his brother dead, his family far away. When did this kind of military style show of force become acceptable on the streets of our country? Did I miss something? Can someone fill me in on when, exactly, as a nation, we became so tremblingly, pee-our-pants-terrified that we sheepishly beg for this kind of massive fascistic over-the-top manhunt to find one stinking little shithead of a kid?

If they find him, will they really need all those bullets and all that protection?

Kittens, we are being conditioned.

Do tell, darling. Yes, we do "get it."

"You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before." - Rahm Emanuel (Emphasis totally mine.)



Kittens, we are being conditioned.

Conditioned to the idea that the police are the military and the military are the police, and that it's all hunky dory. Conditioned to the idea that only a MASSIVE response of government power is appropriate to track down one single 19 year old boy -- for everyone's safety, of course. Conditioned to the idea that this kind of scene is not just appropriate but welcomed and necessary. Conditioned to the idea that an ever more militarized police force is just what we need to be "safe."

But it's not what we need to remain free.

This kind of power will not stay within the boundary of responding to terrorism for long, in my humble opinion. It has very nearly burst those bounds as it is. The bombings in Boston, while horrific and deeply saddening, were the work of two loner brothers, one of whom is already dead, if not by the hail of police bullets, then by the car driven over him by his fleeing brother. If we accept this down-town Baghdad style response from our government as appropriate in America ever, mark my words, we will see this kind of force used in more and more incidences, slowly broadening the acceptable use of force for transgressions against the ever more virulent state.

Rachel Lucas asks the same question, albeit not with the fascistic inference I've given it, and she raises the highly salient point that: 

"certain journalists and leftist commentators are either (1) going silent over the fact that the confirmed suspects are in fact foreign and Muslim, rather than dirty little honky redneck tax-opposing homegrown domestic terrorist teabaggers like they were hoping for, and/or (2) saying now – and only now, after it turns out not to be a cracker teabagger – that it’d be unwise to rush to conclusions or to make assumptions based on demographic factors.

There is a reason for this, kittens. Yup. You guessed it. Conditioning.

As long as the media maintain the drumbeat that the right is inherently dangerous and that it is reasonable to immediately suspect them of just about anything, while simultaneously insisting that there is simply no way to know why anyone who is not a rabid, snarling right-winger would ever DO such a thing, the government can continue to increase its power and use of force without pushback from a frightened and polarized population that is not allowed to even openly discuss the possibility that Islam is a danger to society and should be severely restricted in a free country.

So if you refuse to take reasonable measures to ensure the security of the population, you will inevitably be allowed all manner of UNreasonable measures when all hell breaks loose and the citizens cry for safety.

I think our government wants that. Badly.

And we are giving it to them. And thanking them for it.