When Will Americans Wake Up?

As I type this tonight, the NYPD is preparing to clear Occupy Wall Street protesters from Washington Park. The Denver police department has a swat team out to deal with Occupy Denver protesters, and the Chicago Police Department is now preparing massive arrests in Chicago. Earlier today, Occupy Raleigh protesters were arrested, again, for exercising their First Amendment rights in that city. Protesters have also been arrested or harassed by police in Cincinnati, Seattle, San Diego, Evansville, Dallas, and Des Moines, just to name a few. And yet I still see people expressing the hope that President Obama, presumably because he is a Democrat, and again presuming that being a Democrat indicates that an official is likely to be conscientious about upholding First Amendment and other constitutional rights which are enshrined in the Constitution of the United States.

Clearly, a very large number of American still don't get it. Prominent Republicans, early on into the protests, began referring to members of the Occupy movements as "mobs in the streets." Their bought-and-paid-for media outlets, both broadcast and online, have from the beginning tried to portray current protesters as Communists, Socialists, hippies, druggies, public defecators, fornicators, and every other pejorative epithet they could think of because it was obvious to them from the beginning that the ongoing protests could under no circumstances be turned to their advantage in political terms.

Which brings us to the various crackdowns, which amount to the illegal, unconstitutional denial of the First Amendment rights of Americans taking place this evening, and the hopes, expressed by some, that President Obama will see what is going on and somehow intervene.

Here's a tip, campers: President Barack H. Obama, and his Democratic cohorts in Congress, in the various governors' offices, and in the various state legislatures, don't give any more of a damn about the Constitution or your First Amendment rights than the Republicans do. They've only held off until now because they hoped, their polling numbers currently being in the toilet and slowly circling the bowl, that they could somehow co-opt the protests going on nationwide to improve the President's chances of re-election in 2012 and his Democratic cronies in Congress with him. In hundreds of cities and towns across the United States today, protests were taking place, and where did President Obama spend the day? Monitoring the situation, one might think? Trying to think of a way to address the protesters' concerns? No, President Obama spent some five hours on a fucking golf course! Presumably he was tapped out from the arduous duty of hosting five-course (or whatever they are) state dinners for the visiting President of South Korea, and arranging photo-ops so that the two of them could show themselves in "solidarity" against something.

The ugly, basic fact is that the United States of America has been transformed, right under our noses, into a police state. Either political party may tolerate dissent, but only so long as they believe it may be turned to their own advantage, much as the Hitler regime tolerated (and actually encouraged) the infamous "Kristallnacht" in Germany on Nov. 9-10, 1938, and precisely as the Republican Party and their corporate masters tolerated (and encouraged) the early Tea Party demonstrations in the United States two years ago.

The truth is that today, Americans have no rights other than those which the government du jour (on the federal, state, or municipal level) chooses to indulge. That is a very far cry from the Constitutional reality, in which the American people were sovereign, and their rights came ahead of those of any government on any level.

Americans can debate back and forth that the Tea Party was permitted to do this and that, while Occupy protesters are denied far less (carrying assault weapons to demonstrations, for example), but the point is that once the free people of a free nation leave it up to the government (or administration) of the day to decide who is permitted to do what and for what reasons, it is only a matter of time before all are enslaved. To paraphrase a famous old German tale from the period immediately after World War Two, "First, they came for the Communists, but I wasn't a Communist, so I didn't care. Next, they came for the Jews, but I wasn't a Jew, so I didn't care. Last, they came for me, and there was no one left to care."

What remains to be seen is what (if anything) the American people will decide to do about it, and another enormous question is what the United States military will choose to do about it. All too many Americans, I fear, will take the path of least resistance. So long as they are not being prevented from doing anything they wish to do, it will be much easier, simpler, and safer not to stick their necks out, and indeed many will probably cheer until it is their turn. The military, however, may be another matter.

I am not speaking here of the brass-hats in the Pentagon who are as much political as military in nature, who dispose of trillions of taxpayer dollars paid into the hands of greedy defense contractors, from whom they may then expect a rich reward upon their retirement from military service. I am speaking about the men and women who wear the uniform with pride and honor, who are among the best this country has to offer, who have spent their sweat, their blood, and all too often their lives, defending "freedom" and the "American way of life." All Americans (but for the richest one percent) have suffered during this past decade, and especially in the last three years, but none have suffered or been so abused as they.

Beginning with the infamous "stop-loss" program under the Bush administration, by which the government simply declared "King's X" on conditions under which every single person who had enlisted in the military had signed on the dotted line, now the Washington regime is talking not only about further reducing medical and financial benefits paid to veterans, but also about reducing the pensions and medical care afforded to those brave men and women currently on active service. In some cases, returning heroes are not even being paid the monies due them for their active service, and in hundreds (if not thousands) of cases returning heroes have found that their homes have been foreclosed upon and their families cast into the streets by the criminal banks which support the Washington regime, and to which it is beholden, while they themselves were fighting and dying overseas.

What will happen? Only God knows. Will Americans not immediately concerned with the current protests content themselves with a six-pack and their favorite "reality" television show so long as DHS, the FBI, or the local police are not knocking on their door? Will the rank-and-file in the United States military continue to endure being sent to fight and potentially die to prop up corrupt and ultimately unsustainable regimes in Iraq and Afghanistan while knowing full well that their own government, to which they have sworn allegiance, may very well stab them in the back at home?

We Americans are now "beyond the looking glass." We as a people and as a nation are standing upon ground which Americans have never trod before. All we can do is hope and pray that, if there is a god, Almighty God will look down upon us, forgive us any sins we may have committed, and give us a second chance.