The Granite Tower, Part lll: First Shadow

[Dave Ridley]

Part III
Shadows of the Mahatma
2005-06

"It is the duty of every patriot to protect his country from its government."
     - Patrick Henry

FIRST SHADOW

The authoritarian orgy through which America has passed, and continues to pass, differs from all others of U.S. inception, in the immense power of the rulers and the tame acquiescence of the ruled.   Our blundering yet dangerous agencies of control had, by and large, long histories.  They had lashed out their subjects before.  But now all the cruelties of all the bureaucracies were brought together, and not only suspects but entire populations were thrust haphazard into the funnel of the surveillance regime.

Washington, having loosed the Orwellian genie, kept well in the van of violation.  Brazen defiance of nearly every Constitutional check became her barely challenged hallmark.  But she was followed step after step by the hungry ministries of city and state, enticed to her stifling orbit by the dangling bait of Federal funding.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This page would not exist without FreeTalkLive.com -  Radio that puts *you* in control.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Citizens vanished from the streets and mouldered in their cells five years and more without trial; authorities seized the currency of innocents and charged it with felonious offense.  Wars were proclaimed and inflicted for decades against unapproved fluids and plants, gentle patients summoned from their hospital beds, caged into steel boxes for consuming the contraband cures.

Infant-clutching mothers were gunned down from behind at distance, unconforming cultists burned where they stood in flimsy compounds.  Was it suicide?  Murder?  The quick-arriving bulldozers told no tales.

In tribute to Federal bans on armed pilotry, our hapless neighbors were slaughtered in their travels or carbonized under imploding office towers.  Our children bled or burned to death on alien sands, crusading to spread a freedom that mimicked communism, for a republic that mimicked empire.

Foreign death rates blossomed by the hundreds of thousands.
Alien guerrillas resisted and were tortured under American fists, their privations playfully photographed.

In a moment of meteorologic catastrophe, the far-off wars, or something briefly like them, came crackling into our streets.  And those warriors we had quietly supported with our care parcels and yellow ribbons....

Those warriors turned upon us, came crashing through our doors, seizing our every means of defense, betraying us to the mercy of the looting hordes.   

These were the abuses shocked into public memory by headline; others less disputed would proceed on a wider scale.  Authorities and soldiers in every station loyally opposed the excesses; others at every level joined in or hid their perpetration.  Few took blame; fewer still served sentence.  All ate of the taxpayer's sustenance.

But these developments, these vices, were no monopoly of any one nation or government.  On balance, the peril waxed even greater around the remainder of the Western world.   For in near every "free" country, the spirit of subservience to government grew steadily...powers once held dear to the individual, ceded with thoughtless ease to Authority. 

And in every U.S. state, the organization and structure into which souls were fitted by government's schools and laws...bloated and armed this current.  Trained in their very classrooms to report and eventually surrender vast portions of their own wages, instructed from youth to turn in parent and neighbor for the most victimless of offense, ceaselessly reminded of government's saving history by teachers beholden to its largess...they learned to sacrifice, for the hungry Collective Good, near half the flower of their labor.