On our Friends in Portland...
People have been plucked from the streets in Portland.
Facing all reality, the U.S. hasn’t been the shining beacon of morality for quite some time—if ever, depending on who you ask. But right now, this year, seems to strike a new low, which is impressive for a country that detains American children of color, erects monuments for men who turned traitor on the country and seceded from the union, allows monopolies such as Disney to form despite Anti-Trust laws written many decades before, employs representatives that legally may take bribes (known as “lobbying”) though on the books bribery is unlawful, and provide laughably insufficient aid during the worst nationwide panic since 9/11, and, in my sole opinion, probably before.
Recently, camouflaged men in unmarked vans have pulled civilians off the streets of Portland. That kind of behavior ought to be reserved for two-bit, dystopian science fiction novels and history books, not for our friends and neighbors up north, nor those to our west or east. Nobody deserves this, regardless of their personal beliefs, physical traits, or any other reason; no person should be detained illegitimately. I may disagree with my colleges and countrymen from time to time, as it is our communal and constitutional right to hold our own beliefs, but it would be directly unconstitutional to disagree with this opinion of wrongful detainment; the Fourth Amendment lends to the credibility of the matter. To disagree would be to ignore and cherry pick portions of our Constitution to align with a certain philosophy; when such selective reading occurs, that bridges the way to ignoring more rights, such as that of freedom of speech, press, and religion (the First Amendment), the right to own weaponry (the Second Amendment), due process (the Fifth Amendment), the right to have legal representation, an impartial jury, and a public trial (the Sixth amendment)—and so on, until we have all twenty-seven of the amendments blatantly ignored. Then, how much longer until the Constitution itself is null and void, save for a symbol to point at? An empty symbol?
The year 2020 thus far has been a cacophony of redundancy, fear, death, and a stagnation of the American Dream. We’ve plunged headlong into a bad horror story—and the worst part is, we have no idea how long that story will be. We might be fifty pages away from Happily Ever After, but we can’t rule out that we’ve only just made it past Chapter One. I hope that we’re all reading the book where America gets its act together, and not the one where its torn apart by the wolves on Wall Street and the crocs in the swamp.
To quote one Mr. Anthony Burgess: “What’ll it be then, eh?” Will we succumb to this clear, present danger, domestic as it may be? Or will we do what our dear leader failed to do and actually work against corruption and the rot at the quote-unquote top of our society? Do we hold accountable white-collar crime? Or should we demand a better standard of life—for you, me, and all of our American neighbors?
Political beliefs do not matter anymore. I don’t care what side of the aisle you fall on, because we all fall when this type of behavior starts. To defend this kind of militant, tin-pot, dictatorial, brazen, unconstitutional, bullshit behavior is not only traitorous to our fellow countrymen, but leads to even more dangerous and morally perverse actions. Though a myriad of differences could be drawn between one Donald Trump and the infamous Adolf Hitler, many parallels line up strikingly well. Trump is not Hitler...but Hitler wasn’t Stalin, and Stalin wasn’t Pol Pot, either. All of these countries though—Germany, Russia, and China—were chalked full of displeased people with little or nothing to lose, just like America in the modern day.
America is not impervious to the rise of dictatorship, and this notion was addressed when giving power to impeach and remove elected officials, which we failed to do and, thus, have landed where we are now. Of course, to blame this whole situation on Trump, the Republicans, or any specific group of people would be disingenuous at best and an outright falsehood at the worst. Where we are, like any other moment in history or the future, is a direct and logical result of the actions that came before. This accumulated moment of horror is exactly that—accumulated from decades of redundant policy and propaganda. We have made graven mistakes, and we are paying the price today; the generation before us has left the young saddled with debt, disease, dismay, and a dysfunctional governing system ripe with greedy politicians standing on the backs of common workers. There is no reprieve allotted to the citizens that run the nation silently, while the quote-unquote highest members of society will use this time (as well as the impending housing crisis America will face within months) to reap in fortunes so vast it would be near impossible to spend it all.
America is dying, and it’s because of the cancerous growth of the powerful and elite. Saying so may be a metaphor—but with our people being rounded up in the streets and having their constitutional rights stripped away, it will quickly snap into reality.
I hope beyond hope that I’m wrong. I do wish dearly. I do not want anyone to succumb to abhorrent violence anywhere in the world, and that goes twice as much for my home country, but it seems that is the road we are planning to take. This kind of environment and its results have been well documented throughout history. History never repeats itself, but it likes to rhyme—and America is warming up to sing the next verse. It’s only a matter of time before we walk on stage. We might improvise some. We may even change a word here and there, or perhaps a whole chorus line, but at the end of the day we’ll all recognize the song. Only, we’ll have less Americans alive to hear it.