Reply #78: Authoritarians are your neighbors too.

[kenny blankenship]

but they don't wear t-shirts outing themselves as authoritarians every day. So, it can come as a surprise when you find out they walk among us...

Shoppers in megastores went from being respectable citizens to a kind of generic suspect class who might be forced to prove that they were not shoplifting from the store --rather than the store having to prove the reverse.

Being old enough to have seen this transformation of American society take place and having been sickly fascinated through the 80s and 90s by its smooth, gradual, inexorably up-ratcheting action, I have not been surprised much to see our country lie down during the Bush era for pervasive, preemptive, unwarranted, unConstitutional blanket electronic surveillance, and lie down for illegitimate government in all its forms, from Bush's malignant Unitary Executive and his PermaWar, to corporate supplied DRE balloting fraud. The country that was horrified by and fought back against Nixon's political abuses of the national security apparatus is gone and probably will never be reborn. The outrage was real and the fight was justified and it even scored some rollbacks of arbitrary authority; but even so our national innocence was lost in the contest. After a while we grew a scab over it and learned to just keep our heads down.

This guy in Ohio may lose his cases against Circuit City, he may lose his case against the police, he might even be a "self-righteous asshole", but in simply fighting to preserve and mark out his rights to be treated like a free CITIZEN, instead of like a convict or slave who has to turn his pockets in front of his masters and keepers, he is doing all of you a great favor--which some of you don't deserve.