“Where are you coming from this evening son?” asked the cop, who might have been two years older than me.
“What do you need that information for sir?” I asked with as much contempt as I could pack into an eight-word sentence.
“This is police business. Don’t try and get smart on me. Where are you coming from?” he repeated. This time I could SWEAR that his hand moved closer to his baton. As if to let me know that he was not afraid to beat my brains in for not answering his questions EXACTLY the way he wanted them answered.
“Once again, SIR”, I said with extra sarcastic emphasis on “Sir”, “If you could tell me why you need that information, I would be glad to think about letting you know.”
He huffed like someone had just given him an SAT level math problem, and then walked briskly back to his cruiser. He sat there for a while GLARING at me under the brim of his State Policeman’s hat. I saw him slap his dashboard and shake his head as if he were disappointed about something. He then walked back to my car and literally threw my license and registration into my lap.
“This could be easier next time.” He stated with an air of “how dare you!”
“Yeah, you could have something on me before you pull me over. That would make everything easier.”
“You want to step out here and settle this son,” he said excitedly. There was a tone in his voice that I hadn’t heard in a long time, but I still knew it. This guy wanted to destroy me. He wanted to take me out of my car, get me to throw a punch, and then beat me in to a coma, or worse.
“Are you threatening me sir?” I said with genuine shock. At this point, I was BEGGING for another cop to pull up and see what was going on. But there’s never a cop around when you need one.
He stared into my soul. This guy had flipped. He had reached a point in his head where something didn’t make sense. Everyone that he had pulled over that day had handed him their license and registration and then proceeded to tell him their life story. They made SURE that they cooperated with his every whim, just to get out of a ticket. No one wants to be a criminal right? No one wants to be suspicious of anything. And if a cop pulls you over, he must have you on something. Right? RIGHT?! Wrong.
We live in a time on this earth when people are giving up their most basic of rights in the name of safety and paranoia. Forget the constitution for a minute. Forget the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness just for a moment, and let’s get down to what REALLY matters. Your most basic right in life is to exist an anonymous human being. No one has the right to track your movement. No one has the right to hunt you down and tag you like some rare species of lizard, but that’s what’s starting to happen RIGHT NOW.
There is an old story that says if you put a frog in a pot of water, you can eventually boil him to death as long as you gradually turn up the heat on the stove. He’ll just keep getting comfortable with the heat. No need to escape right? The temperature will get tolerable sooner or later. Is this happening to us? Are we allowing the government to pass laws that take away our freedoms, simply because we are comfortable with the way things are? Are we so complacent that we let things like the Patriot Act and Domestic Security Enhancement Act 2003 just slide through without anyone griping, simply because we don’t want to be labeled as domestic terrorists?
The Domestic Security Enhancement Act 2003 states that the government doesn’t need a warrant if they suspect you as a terrorist. Section 501 of this document states that anyone found breaking a law during a time of war could be considered a terrorist. Before that, section 201 says that the government never has to release the whereabouts of a jailed terrorist. Pretty nice and neat huh? First, we’ll grab you off the street, and then we’ll lock you up and no one ever has to know. And why do things like this get through? Why would we let something go through our government that allows them to completely wipe their ass with the 4th amendment? People are scared to stand out. It really is that simple. People have convinced themselves that if they haven’t “done anything wrong”, and then they don’t have anything to worry about. They are secure in their head that there is no way that the government would mobilize troops on it’s own people. Ask the people that were at Ruby Ridge what they think about that thought process.
The new trend coming through America now is the microchipping of kids. Just take your rugrat into a specialist office, like the ones at a place called Verichip, and just get a little microchip implanted beneath the skin. This chip can be scanned to verify identity, social security number, medical information, place of birth and whatever else you want to be known when those chips get scanned. Why is this a concern, you might ask? Well, think about a government that has total access to the movement of all of its citizens. Think about how easy it would be to declare martial law on the citizens of this country, and then herd them all up into camps, or wherever they wanted us to go. And hey, it’s for our safety right? There is no way that the elitist, rich, power hungry government would EVER put it’s own citizens into camps for no reason right? Well, unless we were at war, and it was the 1940’s and you were of Japanese or German decent. They don’t tell that story too often, now do they?
So when is enough, enough? When do you stop using your credit card with the little magnetic strip on it that tells the bank, and everyone else who wants that information, where and how you spend your money. How do we stop the use of things like face recognition software out of malls and schools? How do we prevent city and state governments from putting cameras on every street corner? How do we keep things like the national ID card from coming to fruition? The answer is a LOT simpler than people might like to think; we simply MUST care where our freedoms go. They CAN’T pass these bills and spend our money this way if we don’t let them. The root of all of this comes back to us as citizens. We MUST shake the apathy from our collective brain, and take the country back from the people that would abuse it and our freedoms.