An Unpopular Point of View

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By BitcoDavid

Yesterday, DeafInPrison.com was one of over 900 sites that went dark in protest of the proposed Internet snooping law known as CISPA. This law would allow government agencies to track your browsing habits, download and read your e-mails, and peek at your social network profiles. Furthermore, it would not only mandate that your ISP willing turn over this information, but would disallow you – the citizen – from suing your ISP, or the “government agencies” in question. It’s all part of the War on Terror®. Everybody knows that the Brown Evil are all a bunch of computer geniuses who are using Twitter to erode your family values.

Had I not reblogged (in the old method) Moorbey’z image of the Guy Fawkes mask from V for Vendetta – now synonymous with the activist group, Anonymous, I would have written about the Siege of Boston, like every other journalist, media outlet, blog site and news source in the world. But what I would have written would probably read a bit different from what you’re seeing everywhere else.

The day after the blackout, I got into a long FaceBook thread with my RL-BFF. (For those of you who actually have lives, RL-BFF means my best friend in real life.) I had mentioned that it disturbed me greatly, to see uparmored Humvees and black clad mercs, running around my city with G.I. ordinance. My friend said they did a great job, and that he didn’t mind the stormtrooper presence, as long as they caught the bad-guys.

Fast Eddie - the Dead.net

Fast Eddie – the Dead.net

The thread ended however, on an ironic note. See, both my friend and I used to have long hair, and were active participants in the drug culture and youth movements of the late ’60s/early ’70s. We both remembered when we were considered the enemy.

And it is from there, from that point of view, that this post is written. I won’t defend the Tsarnaev brothers – if in fact, they are indeed guilty. What they did was horrible, and the surviving brother certainly deserves everything the justice system can throw at him. My point is simply this. An invasion – albeit benign – is still an invasion. In my mind, there is little difference between militarized Staties, armed with automatic rifles and crowd control chemical agents, and an invasion force from a hostile nation. Call me a Pinko if you must, but I can only see commonality between SWAT teams on Boylston St., and SS divisions marching through Poland.

And when we let fear move us to hand the keys over to these militarized forces, what’s to stop them from simply taking the store? In Akira Kurosawa‘s classic film, 7 Samurai , the warriors were hired to protect the village from bandits – which they did. Problem was, nobody was there to protect the village from the warriors. So what if the cops weren’t great? What if somebody said, “I’m sorry officer, but I have to see a warrant?” Martial Law really sucks. Oh, and let me point out, a study revealed that over 5000 people were wrongly convicted in 2012. Yet, in just under 250 years, we’ve only had 2 terrorist attacks on our own soil. So let’s run the math. According to WolframAlpha, your chances of getting wrongly convicted are 625 thousand times better than your chances of getting blown up by terrorists.

And I’m still gonna need someone to explain this:

While everybody is quaking in fear over the Tsarnaev brothers, and all the other terrorists plotting to blow us up, we’ve all forgotten our fear of 1984. Personally, I  would much rather die in a terrorist bombing, than live under the yoke of dictatorship.

BitcoDavid is a blogger and a blog site consultant. In former lives, he was an audio engineer, a videographer, a teacher – even a cab driver. He is an avid health and fitness enthusiast and a Pro/Am boxer. He has spent years working with diet and exercise to combat obesity and obesity related illness.

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Comments (4)

  1. decarceratenow

    Many, many thanks David. On this one – we are in sync.

    Susan ?Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.? Assata Shakur

    Date: Tue, 23 Apr 2013 21:47:42 +0000 To: [email protected]

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