Due Diligence or Do We Live in a Police State?

The recent news story about Mayor Cheye Salvo and his encounter with the county police during their drug raid of his home in Berwyn Heights, MD is one of the more horrendous breaches of privacy I have read about, particularly given the personage involved.  I am not suggesting that preferential treatment is warranted or positive, its just surprising that it wasn't applied in any form in this case.  Further, and more horrifically, the execution-style killing of the family's two black labrador retrievers begs several questions.  It should be noted that without actually being privy to the "real" facts of the case and rather having to rely on newsources such as CNN, I reserve the right to make corrections if needed to my argument and must insert this as a caveat for this post.  In this context, it must be stated that the facts of the case, in my view, clearly support the Mayor's claim that this was a civil rights abuse and a violation of the code of ethics by the police involved.  The description of the events that would give pause to nearly anyone hearing the story is further supported by the stilted explanations and perfunctory apologies offered by the spokesperson for the county police department.  She could not give a better explanation for the raid team's actions regarding the Mayor's family pets other than, "The dogs must have posed a risk however, the decision to enter the home was made solely onsite by the team."  In one sentence, she claims no responsibility for the police department in the dogs' shooting and provides a questionable explanation for why due diligence was not undertaken to ascertain that the information that allowed them to secure the search warrant was valid.  This matter is not simply something to which we should respond, "Oh, that's just awful."  Rather, each of us as citizens should be incredibly troubled by the actions of the police in this case.  We all want to feel safe and particularly in our own homes and more to the point the police should be harbingers of this safety not perpetrators of vigilante justice.  If, under the guise of "my life is in danger", our law-enforcement can use any means "necessary" to "secure" the area, then not only is our privacy in jeopardy, but our very way of life.

My purpose in relating this incident here is to pose the question, "When does the price of our so-called safety come at too high a price?"  In conjunction with the recent approval of FISA or the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act by Congress, it brings to mind a comment made recently by a friend.  He said to me after the FISA vote, "If the cost of freedom is too high, the move to Iran."  He actually felt all members of Congress who voted for the bill should be removed from office.  The point he raises about the abridgment of our freedoms in the name of the War on Terror seems quite valid and disturbing.  At what point do we simply take the risk of living the freedoms that we fought for in the Revolutionary War and hope those without conscience won't take it away?  Or do we live in bubble, safe but completely devoid of "freedoms" that we actually had been fighting for?  How do our so-called values figure in here?  My view is that Scott (my friend) is correct that at some point excessive curtailing of our civil rights will only lead to a compromise of our ideals and turn the country that we love and would fight for into a vacuous shell of what it is supposed to represent.  It seems that if we love our way of life we cannot continue to remove access to it for regular Americans or we risk becoming the very forces that we claim to fight in places like Iran.

An Introduction and a Bit of a Retrospection: Apathy vs. Urgency; Are We Starting to "Care" More?

As this is my inaugural post I thought I might relay something here I actually wrote a year or so ago regarding a film that really provided the impetus behind my push for a new kind of patriotism.  The film in question is originally done in Hindi and is entitled, Rang De Basanti (Painted Yellow).  I wanted to address it today since it really hit home with a number of personal issues I have struggled with much of my life; including those of national identity, patriotism, and justice.  The mobilization of these concepts as signifiers within the American political narrative has always been troubling for me as it seems to create an atmosphere of slogan politicking and an endless campaign.  This has, in my view most aptly been demonstrated by the Dubya years as perception became more important than reality.  The film set in India, shows a group of young people who live fairly carefree lives until they are initiated into the world of ethnic difference and political expediency through the bitter loss of one of their own.  In the wake of their tragedy they stage a takeover of an Indian radio station to protest the actions of the government and are eventually killed by police officers who manage to storm the building.   Of course, there is more to the film than this brief sketch but what is most interesting is the strong assertion at the end regarding the power of the collective to produce change.

By and large, within the scope of American politics, it seems more and more difficult to define oneself as a ‘patriot’ as the word itself has been developed into a messianic will to power that has grown from disturbing to deadly.  It is the precisely the flaccidity in American political life and apparently the global community as well, which continues all of us on this highly destructive path.   As Americans, apathy, we have in spades, while compassion and concern are bumper-sticker catchphrases whose only value is a virtual one.  For me, patriotism is a belief in the potential of the United States, in what we alone are capable of becoming and achieving.  We have the capacity to transform the world in a way that is positive, progressive, and productive for most rather than a few.  Instead, our increasingly militant foreign policy has alienated us from allies and taken us, in my view, further away from ‘modernity’.  Modernity, in this context, is continually progressing towards economic, social, and political structures that seek to include and improve rather than alienate, the prospect of global citizenship and possibility for successful existence without the threat of extinction.  Instead, through our influences and the collusion of our partners on the world stage, the notions of “virtue” and “morality” are flattened and then "pinballed" into complex political machinations and power structures in order to only advance the interest of a few.  I think this film demonstrates an awakening that must happen to the American electorate in order to move forward.  

My reasoning for initiating my blog with this post is because though I wrote this quite awhile ago (in fact before Barack Obama decided to run for president), I feel its even more true now.  However, I also see for the first time since the release of this film the real potential for its message to be realized.  No matter what happens in this election, as Americans we have swerved from apathy to urgency which can only bode well for our future.