So, it’s no great secret I’ve never been overly fond of the U.S.A…. Since I dislike disposable consumerism, am a bit of a closet green freak, I’m a lesbian, and really, really hate guns then the U.S.A. is unlikely to top my list of favourite countries; but the place is really beginning to unnerve me.
I always kind of presume that you get this natural swing; you get people going “no, no, no, we’re getting too liberal” and lo, the pendulum swings the other way; until the rebelious nature of some members of the public starts to kick in and voilà , you’re heading back towards the middle. But over in America, land of the free, something really disturbing seems to be happening. Something which is remaining almost unreported by the ‘free’ press in the U.S.A.
The New York Press article is the first hint that something’s amiss (a giant cage. Mmm, sounds nice), and then you read these two webjournals and start to think what the fuck?
The question of how biased the media on the left are being is, of course, something to be very much aware of. Everyone has a story to tell, and a point to make…. But the fact that even mainstream media is forced to accept the existance of arrests of indivduals doing nothing wrong suggests there’s something seriously overzealous in the police tactics.
Lawyers who appeared in the city’s arraignment court said, for example, that on Saturday a building superintendent named Andre Lebbt, 49, was arrested while he was taking out the garbage. They also described arrests of a man walking home from a sushi restaurant, and another man dressed in a business suit going home from work
(NY Times, 02/09/2004).
Taking out the garbage!, let’s just run that past people again. The man was taking the rubbish out and gets arrested?! That’s seriously fucked up. Incidentally, you could also read: MTV’s report or the Christian Science Monitor’s report(!)…
Normally this kind of stuff would, well, not be mentioned in the mainstream media; if they’ve arrested 1,700 protestors then what to 3 or 4 accidental arrests mean? But it seems to fit awfully closely with the comments in the web-journals….
….more and more America seems to be swinging dangerously away from any real form of democracy, I mean we all know that Bush wasn’t elected last time, he just took power and the democratic party were quite happy to let him take it (I mean, what is that about?!). But now the american population seem to be largely acquiescing as Bush turns America into what is, fairly much, a police state; more than that they actually seem to *want* him to have another term in office, to take away even more of their freedoms… Perhaps these protests are the signs of a much, much larger movement to change the direction their country is headed in, but with the current stats at : Bush 50%, Kerry 47% it doesn’t hugely look like it.
This post is thanks to Kittenarmy’s very quick mention in her Livejournal.