Published: Monday 30 September 2013
Clearly we are not safer now. And as Franklin warned so presciently, when it comes to our liberties, we are now in danger of losing it all.
I no longer recognize my country.
Back in 1997, after two years living in China, and five more living in Hong Kong, during which time, as a correspondent for Business Week magazine, I slipped in and out of China regularly as a journalist to report on developments there, I got a good dose of life in a totalitarian society. When I alit from the plane in Philadelphia where my family and I were about to start a new chapter of our lives, I remember feeling like a big weight had been lifted off my chest.
The sense of freedom was palpable.
Almost immediately, though I got an inkling that something was amiss. An art teacher in Upper Dublin, the suburban town where we had bought a house, had just been arrested, charged with theft of $400 in school art supplies. Of course, my initial reaction was, “Great school district we’re in, if the teachers are stealing from the school!”
The teacher, Lou Ann Merkel, who had been arrested and briefly jailed pending arraignment, was fired and was facing trial on a felony charge of stealing public property. But in a few weeks, as I followed the story in the local weekly paper, it became clear that there had really been no theft (she was taking old supplies which were being replaced with new ones, intending to bring them to a local community center used by low-income children who went there for day care and after-school care. Moreover, when stopped by the principal and told that the old supplies had to be put in the dumpster, she grudgingly complied. She was arrested anyway later, at her home). I learned over subsequent weeks of news reports that Merkel actually was being hounded by an obsessive power-tripping school administration simply for being an “activist” and outspoken teacher. A school board hearing I attended was packed in December of that year with over a hundred angry parents and former students of Merkel’s demanding that the board drop its case against her. It did not, but a county judge had the good sense to do exactly that, ruling that “no crime occurred here.” (Merkel, who got her job back with back pay, later sued the school district and won a significant judgement against it.)
This was one small example of government tyranny run amok but since then I have seen it become the norm in a United States where people are now being arrested for almost everything -- kids jailed without trial for shoplifting, hitchhikers jailed for arguing, correctly, with cops that it is not illegal for them to thumb for a ride, non-white youths in many cities stopped and frisked for “walking while black or hispanic” and then getting busted on trumped up charges (resisting arrest, assaulting an officer, disturbing the peace, etc.) when the cops find no guns or drugs on them, protesters beaten and gassed and jailed for simply trying to exercise their First Amendment rights.
But that is just the surface.
As a journalist working in China, I had to watch my back all the time. Spies from the Ministry of State Security (China’s KGB) or one of the local Public Security Bureaus that operate under its jurisdiction would secretly follow my movements, and would keep track of whoever I interviewed. In one case, after my departure, they badly beat a source to the point that he had to be hospitalized for reconstructive surgery to his crushed cheek bones (his entire groin region was also left black and blue after his brutal beating). The man’s offense? He had shown me around a rural region where peasants were improving their lives by sending some of their children off to the city to do construction jobs.
Now it’s happening here in the US, only worse. Not only is the National Security Agency monitoring every phone call I make, every email I sent, every person I interview and every article I write--something Chinese police were not capable of at least in those days--but the agency can be watching what I write at this moment, as a type these letters on my keyboard.
Further Reading: http://www.nationofchange.org/police-state-america-1380552203
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