The Greater Tragedy

The truly scary part of the events in Boston, and by extension the events like it over the last  few years, is how it brings out the absolute worst in an unthinking public.

  The news that 2 suspects had been identified and one of them had been killed by police was actually greeted with cheers by co-workers of mine.  One of the coworkers said mockingly to me “Would love to hear your take on their so called ‘civil liberties’ now.”  His position , reiterated to me multiple times over the recent past is that ‘terrorists’ have no civil rights, no right to a trial, just kill them. He has used this mental blind spot towards his own horrific statements  to celebrate the  drone bombing of innocent people in faraway lands. He has actually made the statement “It serves them right for living so close to  the bad guys.”

  So let me make myself very very plain here. A human being accused of a crime has the right to a trial regardless of what crime he is accused.   Notice I did not simply say ‘a citizen’ has that right, and I did that on purpose. My rights, and yours, do not come from a piece of paper, even if they are enumerated by that piece of paper. My rights and yours come from our humanity and a fair society will honor the rights of whoever happens to be under its jurisdiction at the moment, whether they be a ‘citizen’ or not.  To do less is to commit a crime against the accused.

  The state enjoys a monopoly on violence in many areas, and a monopoly on the ability to incarcerate.  I cannot lock my neighbor up in a cage if he transgresses against me, only the state enjoys that privilege.  In theory, to counterbalance that privilege, the burden of proof rests upon the state to make their case before a jury of my peers that a crime was committed and that it was committed by me.  If they cannot make that case, then I go free, even if everybody ‘knows’ I did it.

  When we cast that aside and we seriously contemplate extra-judicial killings for certain offenses, a couple of things happen.  First of all we sacrifice a piece of our humanity by our crimes against the accused. Secondly, that list of crimes where it’s acceptable to just ‘take them out back and shoot them’ always grows larger over time. Trials are expensive, and the system is cumbersome. It’s hard to get a conviction, and it should be, because an out of control police state is far more dangerous than an out of control bomber.

Boston

  Well now that the  gummint seems to have found their patsys, it will be interesting to see how this pans out.  It prompted some interesting  discussions here amongst co-workers, in which  NeoCon (my pet name  for him)  puffed his chest out and   publicly  gushed over the  brave  police and such that  risked life and limb to find the perp.  He  mocked me a bit saying that this incident  sort of makes null my opposition to   cameras on every street corner.  I told him I didn’t have all the facts, but my gut was that  the 2^nd  guy will never  see the inside of a jail cell. They will kill him first and claim he was resisting arrest.  He laughed a bit and told me that cops are  specially trained not to shoot unarmed people and he  would challenge  me to find  a single incident where a cop shot a suspect  just for resisting arrest.  I’m not entirely certain what planet he’s  from or what planet he currently lives on.

Sincerely Wrong

  In the wake of the  bombing in Boston earlier this week,  Susan Estrich, who by all  indicators seems to be a very nice lady,  wrote a syndicated  column that appeared  in our local  paper  entitled 'Just Keep My Children Safe From Terror'. This  no doubt heartfelt column is  such a sterling example of wrong thinking that  I felt it necessary to   address it.  She writes:
"What do we want the government to do? How  much of our liberty and privacy are willing to give up in the hopes that it might  stop terror?.....So this is my answer: I'd give up a lot.  You want cameras on every corner? Fine with me. I don't care who pats me down at the airport. Pat away. Keep the confidences of my clients, but other wise my email is  an open book. Mine my data;listen to my conversations. If it will keep my children safe, I don't care."
  I know,gentle reader ,that there are  a plethora of angles from which one could approach this  wrong thinking. I'll just throw out a couple of the more obvious ones and we'll see where this goes.
  Giving up liberty has never brought security. Ever. Our security is in our liberty. The reason is simple. Your government is more of a threat than any network of terrorists ever will be.  To entrust the government with the power it seeks is worse than giving the fox  the keys to the henhouse; its giving him the  keys, an axe,a pot full of boiling water, and a book  of chicken recipes.  To trade liberty for safety is to trade what you cannot get back for what you will never gain.
  Mrs Estrich says that she would be comfortable living in a  surveillance state, which to her would make her safe.  Never mind that the governments of the world killed  over 200 million people in the last century, a number  terrorists could never hope to match.   Even if she could  give away her liberties in exchange for safety, and even if the  state were capable of  making her safe, by what right does she impose that condition on everybody else? I for one am not  comfortable with  more power given to an entity whose very nature is rooted in brutality.  It will not keep her children safe  nor more than it will keep  my children safe. Instead she will be fitting them with the manacles of their  own enslavement while softly cooing to them that it's all worth it.  Patrick Henry must be turning in his grave by now.
  I  have full faith and confidence that Mrs. Estrich means every word she wrote. That, unfortunately is the truly scary part.