Just awoke from a nightmare of being drowned

[azul]

after watching Bill Moyers' Journal last night. It was deeply disturbing, but I think every American owes it to their own conscience to see it. The question is, what are we going to do about it?

Then I wrote this, and then read the Moyers threads. I still can't sleep.



Say the speed limit is 55 and you are doing 70 and the state trooper flashes you to pull over. Would you try to run if you thought that you could get away? What if there were drastic cutbacks on troopers and you knew your chances of getting caught were low, would you continue speeding, even driving at whatever speed you preferred, like everyone else was doing?

What if every driver around you was doing 70 but only you got the ticket. Would you then fight it, with a defense of everyone was speeding so this should be dismissed?

If you know what the law is and you break it knowingly, are you prepared to suffer the consequences. Are you a scofflaw, or a weasel when you so choose to be?

Conscientious objecting is taking the punishment for lawbreaking until the jails are too full so that the law is changed.

Laws are laws, if you don’t like them, you are free to move elsewhere where laws are different. No one, in this country that respects the rule of law, is above the law. No one. not even the president, can say that his word is the law, and that established law does not apply to him if he says so.


The USA military and CIA were caught breaking laws kidnapping and torturing people. From the top down this was ordered, with secret memos to try to justify and to have some kind of deni ability in this horrendous and illegal actions.

Not only that, but false confessions from use of torture were presented to congress and the public as material reason to invade and occupy a sovereign country, killing hundreds of thousands of people in the process.

The people are the law enforcement in this country where people are the government. We own it , and its actions, and must take responsibility for it. We are become a nation of lawbreakers of the worst sort if we do not correct this privileged executive power gone criminal and amok.

Are you ready to give up the rule of law, and for what? Or do we hold those responsible for high crimes to account?

[tomreedtoon]

1. Dictatorships solved the problem of "too full jails."

They simply kill people. No need for prisons or concentration camps. Mass graves are like the Wal-Mart of political control; volume and low costs.

Sure, it might seem extreme for you to be killed for speeding - and maybe the family with you, if they were screaming - but it keeps costs down.

That has always been the big problem with conscientious objectors. They're saying in essence, "You can't do anything to me for violating the law." The law doesn't say anything in response, just aims and fires.

Thinking about it, it's only the slight sense of morality - a sense that I feel is now gone from the law enforcement community - that kept Vietnam protesters from being gathered up, sent to a quiet place and turned into fertilizer. If the Ohio National Guard had arrested and offed the Kent State kids in some place far from the TV cameras, there wouldn't have been any public outrage.

I fully expect to see this simple solution to a troublesome problem used more and more here in America.

ON EDIT: Oh, I should have credited the modern pioneers in this solution. The Khymer Rouge. I think that they've done a lot to educate American police and military personnel.