You are.
I love my dogs. I also love my children. I have absolute confidence that my local county and state police, as well as federal authorities would not intentionally harm any of them without good cause.
What happened here, does not do all that much to reinforce that sense of confidence.
There are a lot of people who will point out that what happened is the result of our current war on drugs, or that it’s the fault of one administration, or another.
That’s not the case. It may have been agrivated by those two conditions, but that’s also beside the point.
We live in a representative democracy. This means that we ultimately are the people responsible for actions of our police, or our elected and apointed govornment.
When your elected officials say, or do something, they are doing so as your representative. If they say something that you do not believe represents your position, it is up to you to make that known.
For the vast majority of people, political involvement ends up being little more than babbling incoherently to a co-worker or the person sitting next to them on the bus on their way to work. When you look at the election turn out for most of the US, the majority of eligable voters don’t even bother to vote. And the vast mojority of those people do nothing more than vote a party line, and have no further interaction with their govornment.
On occasional hot button issues, there will be a massive mailing of outraged people to their representatives. Most of these have the creative evidence of printing a pre-written PDF without even signing them and dropping it in the mail. Occasionally someone gets the bright idea to hand copy that letter.
If you want action on something like this issue, it really is up to you. You need to provide a reason for your representative to look at your position, and respond. At the moment, that means hand written. A note from me, might, read something like:
I’m very aware that we have a significant issue with drugs abuse and distribution in our country. I hardly consider that to be a position of pride to communicate with the rest of the world over. However it appears that people we select and pay to work on correcting this issue are taking advantage of the powers that have been granted to them to go beyond addressing this issue. Whether it is confiscation of property suspected of having been involved in a drug transaction, that has no significant evidence, or even the damages to property as a result of a successul raid on a drug related raid, or worse the death of pets or family members in poorly handled and impropely investigated raids, I’m personally of the opinion that this is a sign of abuse of authority.
I personally would like to know what your plan is to reduce the appearance that we have gone from having an organized mob as a criminal element in our society to having an organized mob of criminals supposedly protecting us. Note that I am not suggesting that we actually do have that happening, just that when officers of the law are making statements as justification for their behavior that have little or no basis on reality, it certainly doesn’t improve the perception by people that we are concerned about all in our community.
But you should come up with your own set of questions and concerns. Write it out on good quality stationary. Include a self addressed stamped envelope for a response to be sent back in. If you have a copier available, include a copy, and file a copy of the letter for reference later on.
The United States of America is govorned for and by it’s people. Act on that with wisdom and integrity.
Ever since I learned how much Prohibition did to strenghten organized crime in this country I have wondered how we can keep repeating that mistake. Yet we do, the Patriot act has eroded civil protections and the war on drugs puts people who never hurt anyone but themselves in jail all the time. If they announced a unilateral surrender in the war on drugs tomorrow I would be glad. I wouldn’t go out looking for a dime bag or anything but I would be glad. Any time authorities have a tool they tend to use it, including swat teams, I wish they had never ever seen the need for such a thing. There is just no personal responsibility when you start getting so many people involved. This story scared the bejeezus out of me.
Comment by Tamyra — February 3, 2009 @ 11:24 pm
In “Time Enough for Love” (I think I may be thinking of a different book) Heinlein has Lazeras Long provide some comentary on the thought that humans could learn some things from his memuars, etc. To Paraphrase LL, “The problem with presuming that humans can learn from the experiences of others is the assumption that humans learn at all. They mostly don’t, not even from their own experiences.”
We often joke that ‘insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different result.’ and attribute the quote to Albert Einstein. While he may have made that observation, the reality is that to change from doing the same thing over and over and getting the same result one has to recognize that the result is from the action, the result is undesirable, and that to come up with a different result will require performing a different variety of actions, the collection of which indicates that some learning has taken place.
Charlie expects that the little girl will learn that if she puts her finger in his mouth, that it will cause pain when he bites down on her finger, and that this means that charlies mouth is probably not a good place for a little girl to put her finger. The fact that she does the same thing again is as much a surprise to charlie as to any reasonably well thinking person. However we see in action after action, law after law that not only do we not learn what seems to be a clear lesson from our history, but also people claiming that the clear evidence of history means something completely at odds with the evidence.
One example of that would be the declaration that ‘History is written by the winners’ and as a result, since the winner at the end of prohibition was the anti-prohibition movement, that anything said that reflects poorly on prohibition is clearly the result of one of these ‘winners’ creating history out of lies that they want to propagate.
Personally I think it’s a sad statement on humanity. More so that it’s sad that this is a significant part of what makes us human. I will acknowledge that it is also why we do things such as farm in flood planes, as well as build cities there. Why we build resorts in places that occasionally (very infrequently) see Tsunami and Hurricane events. Why we have people who live on the side of Vesuvius, and so on. We have this fundamental belief that something within us will prevail and win in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, over the long term. We end up with bumper crops for decades, spending glorious weekends and months on pristine beaches, all the while putting money into communities and environments that will not sustain the damages that history has shown these areas will take.
To go on doing in the face of evidence that tells us that we should do something else, may very well be insane, but it is also human. So we will see more War on Drugs, Prohibition, and innocent people and pets killed in the name of the greater good. But we can each take what we have learned for ourselves, and act on those lessons. So ask your representatives and senators. And make personal choices based on those lessons.
Personally I want a house like S.A.R.A.H. from Eureka, that can actively defend against invaders. But I doubt we are going to see that come about anytime in the near future. It might injure the innocent burglar.
Comment by Rusty — February 9, 2009 @ 10:54 pm
I guess that sometimes being human is just a crapshoot. I choose not to have a lock on my locker at work, I haven’t usually got anything worth stealing in there, beyond some cash once in a while (usually a very little cash) but that is rumored to be a changing thing, we are going to be assigned locks and required to use them because they are planning random drug searches, and they want to know that nobody can say “somebody must have put that stuff in there , it wasn’t locked”. It may be a small liberty to give up for the sake of a greater protection, but it chafes me. I know I can adapt, I manage to keep my keycard available at the necessary times these days, when it was hard to keep track of for a long time, I don’t know how many I “lost”. I still forget I need it to open the door somedays even with it in my hand. I will adapt but it will bother me, I don’t want to have to learn to be that suspicious, that shut away from freedom. I would like to think my coworkers and myself are innocent until proven guilty, but that seems to be slipping away.
Comment by Tamyra — February 9, 2009 @ 11:38 pm