There is a hue and cry from the right that citizens are disturbing the peace because they have taken to the street to protest.
But are we really at peace?
At home, we have social violence, suffered in body and spirit, when those who are ill can’t afford to be treated to become healthy, those who had homes don’t any longer, and some don’t have apartments and live in cars or on the street, those who would work can find none, those who do work can be forced to work longer hours for less pay with fewer benefits, those who would learn can’t afford an education, those who are aged are insecure in the years they were promised would be golden but have turned leaden instead.
Is the status of aloneness, of lost self-worth, of weakness the indicia of peace and prosperity? I think not. If this be our peace, then shouldn’t it be disturbed?
Fundamental Fairness is an essential clause in the social compact that we made with each other in the formation of this imperfect union – and it’s been ruptured almost irreparably in favor of the wealthy few.
Abroad, we fight wars for plunder at the expense of the life and limb of our young men and women who can hardly find any other way of life to work and live but to join the service for the promise of grand adventure and unequaled skills when they’ve finished their tours of duty. Unfortunately, when these men and women come home, if not disabled or broken by PTSD or TBI, they find these promises were a lulling breeze in the wind.
We support torture as a policy against anyone we deem our enemy and are surprised when these young men and women are tortured. We unleash destructive and hellish forces into civilian populations against women and children and non-combatants and wonder why the inhabitants don’t praise us as their liberators, why they scorn us, and why they form protective coalitions with our enemies.
We drain our treasury and borrow funds to fight these wars whose success is indeterminate, at least for the citizens of this nation who underwrite these conflicts with their taxes and loans from Far East nations at the expense of taking care of our own here at home.
It is wrong therefore to think those rude and “disturbing” who merely protest against the social violence that they have suffered at home and in the wars abroad.
It is indisputable that the Darth Vader garbed police, with their plastic head-butting shields, who sprayed pepper point blank into the faces of peaceful protesters, young and old, all passive, used excessive force and committed crimes of assault and battery.
The learned lesson is that freedom of speech is a prepositional freedom. You may have freedom OF speech but you do not have freedom AFTER speech.
Our nation’s local leaders appear to be coordinating efforts to circumscribe that freedom to protest with permits and timetables and arrests. They are so concerned about our safety and our health – they say. They recoil at the possibility of tents and pizza boxes that might not be cleaned up when, in truth and fact, these protesters have cleared all the waste themselves. We all know what’s really going on here. They are muzzling citizens speaking the truth.
These protests are the symptoms of our failure to provide for the “general welfare” and to define what defense of the nation requires – as opposed to jingoistic adventuring around the world to expand American hegemony. We must steer the nation true again and it is really up to us - because most of our elected leaders are so defensive and disturbed, they don’t appreciate that it’s our nation at risk – and nothing less.
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