Through some personal correspondence there is word of a new law in California, you can read about it here. Apparently it is now illegal to throw a football, or a Frisbee, on the beach there now because of the risk of injury. The whole point of throwing a Frisbee or a football on the beach instead of your living room was because it was wide open and there is less risk of getting hurt or breaking something. Next thing you know they will ban swimming because of the risk of drowning, or ban tanning because of the risk of cancer.
Although there are many laws like this around the country, I am of the belief this marks a watershed moment in American political and legal thought. It’s a bad one too—most of us are now living in a police state for all intents and purposes.
Big government is the bane of human existence, individuality and freedom and antithetical to the very purpose of America—to live freely without restriction from a tyrannical government, and where everyone is treated as an innocent until proven otherwise. A police state makes the opposite assumption, that individual freedoms are a threat to the safety and well being of society and the individual is naturally guilty until they show themselves to be of value or innocent of guilt.
Locally, here in Arizona, while laws are less onerous than in California, they are still nonetheless creeping on the formation of the police state mentality. A local radio show yesterday morning touched upon this subject—it is not just about our current administration but about government in general. Each preceding administration has stepped on individual rights in an effort to make society safer, no matter Republican or Democrat, conservative or liberal, tyrannical or benevolent. While the current administration has been the most aggressive about the shift toward a police state, others are no less guilty.
Police states also dispense justice in an arbitrary and unfair manner. While police officers ticket and arrest individuals for throwing Frisbees on a California beach, or heavily fine people for going so much as five miles per hour over the speed limit, people are being raped and murdered in their homes. Criminals rarely go unpunished, but society is no more secure than it was before it became tyrannical. The innocent and the guilty are punished equally in the courts, as a twisted sense of fairness is emphasized rather than real justice. If you fly on a plane, you are searched like a criminal, while others wear underwear and shoes that could explode. When you go to a ballgame or event, your pockets are emptied if they look full and your better half’s purse is gone through like hound dog goes through old socks. If you question the wisdom of such actions, you are labeled a possible criminal and held for questioning.
In some states if your kids are late to school too much you are arrested. Sports are no longer tests or rites of manhood or skill, but an exercise on who can play without injury in a perverted attempt to establish equality. Drinking, eating and living well are frowned upon and earning wealth is punished as being greedy or excessive. Why? Because it drains power and siphons wealth from the State.
The pig is slaughtered not because he killed the chicken but because he witnesses the wolf doing it. Crimes are still committed but now everyone suffers.
Politically correct thought and speech now have become a way of life for most Americans. To step out of line with a mere Twitter, or random thought in a moment of angst brings down the wrath of the media and the law in an effort to condemn and destroy individuality and control populations. As the people become more unsettled and unrest begins to form the police state responds in the only way it knows how—with more laws, arrests and restrictions. It eventually leads to more violence and hostility between the citizenry and the state. We all read the stories about people that commit suicide by police and policemen today are forced to be more wary, arm themselves more heavily, and become less connected with the community. They become a neighborhood’s unwilling oppressors instead of its protectors. Open a paper today and the astonishing harshness of both the law as well as the criminal is manifest. Petty crimes go unresolved as the police become inundated with the more violent ones and more laws are passed in a vainglorious effort to quell the expanding level of unrest, or as politicians seek to garner more votes to solidify their own hegemony.
Taxes naturally explode as government draws upon its treasury to meet the increasing demands of new equipment and forces to maintain order. We have reached that point now in most local and civil governments as police, fire and basic protection services costs explode to enforce all the new laws. Government bureaucracy expands exponentially in order to meet the expanded needs of an overwhelmed courts system and horrific crimes are treated on the same level as parking tickets in a further effort to be ‘fair’. Other much needed services suffer then as costs overwhelm the system. Most community’s services like foster care, adoption and child protection go underfunded and as a result the need for police protection increases, creating a downward death spiral of costs to taxes.
Government increases taxes, leading to fewer jobs, and less money in the taxpayer’s pockets, which then leads to more need for more services and more laws and more government. The end result of a police state is a failed social safety net and mass unrest and poverty.
The police state then tries to control what food you eat, where to go for a job, how to behave, what to think and what to say. This is where we are now; this is the legacy of big government.
The only viable solution to a police state is less government, to vote in leaders that will shift the power back to the people in the form of government deconstruction, fewer laws and less money taken in taxes. Those leaders are rare, and grow rarer as government asserts its growing authority because the police state educational system only educates people how to survive in the system, and not to think for themselves. If you vote into power people who believe that government can solve problems and should be the arbiters of fairness and safety, you are voting for the end result—the specter of the police state.
Consider this when you vote at the ballot box.
Before it is too late, and the ballot box is made illegal.
