>How is it possible that things like this are going on in this country?
This is all basic human nature. In 1776 we established that it is advantageous to a have a government which its people are capable of overthrowing. That understanding turns out to generalize well. Jefferson said it best: "When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty."
You never want to give the government so much power that its people can no longer stop it should its leaders turn malicious. The problem is that the argument that government power could be used for malicious purposes is not heard until it actually is, and by that point it is too late. What you fail to stop with words and votes in 1933 you are then forced to stop with bombs and blood through 1945.
But we have short memories. King George is someone you read about in the history books. The men and women who fought (or survived) the Nazis are mostly dead now, as are the Japanese held in internment camps. Joe McCarthy was dead by the time most of us were born. Stalin is gone and the Russians are our "friends" now. Rwanda was far away and we don't know any of those people. The things our government does are generally somewhat less bad than the things those governments did, which makes constitutional provisions that impede tyranny start to look more like the proverbial bear-repelling rock rather than the cause of that fact.
And it wasn't so long ago that some hell-bound sons of bitches made a permanent modification to the New York City skyline. Which tempts us to forget the millions who have died at the hands of bad governments in order to avenge the thousands who died in the towers.
People want simple solutions. The FBI says they want X. They say X will help the FBI catch terrorists. But it will also help the Chinese government catch dissidents. It will help dictators catch revolutionaries. It will help terrorists and foreign governments conduct espionage. The FBI doesn't tell you that part.
The current expansion of police power in the United States began when Lenin ruled Russia, and hit the second half of the chess board during the height of the Cold War. It is not that Americans somehow forgot about the tyrannies of the 20th century; rather, the people who were most harmed by this trend have historically been the underrepresented and oppressed minorities. It was before World War I that American police began to claim that they needed higher-caliber sidearms to deal with black men who used cocaine. The Special Weapons Assault Team (later renamed Special Weapons And Tactics, to sound less militaristic) was envisioned in 1967 and has since become a standard feature of even rural police forces. The Controlled Substances Act was passed in 1970, which among other things gives the Attorney General the power to declare law without democratic action.
The FBI's current push is not some kind of new thing, nor is it somehow unique to this current generation. This is part of a decades-long trend, one that has been monotonically accelerating since its very beginning.
This is all basic human nature. In 1776 we established that it is advantageous to a have a government which its people are capable of overthrowing. That understanding turns out to generalize well. Jefferson said it best: "When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty."
You never want to give the government so much power that its people can no longer stop it should its leaders turn malicious. The problem is that the argument that government power could be used for malicious purposes is not heard until it actually is, and by that point it is too late. What you fail to stop with words and votes in 1933 you are then forced to stop with bombs and blood through 1945.
But we have short memories. King George is someone you read about in the history books. The men and women who fought (or survived) the Nazis are mostly dead now, as are the Japanese held in internment camps. Joe McCarthy was dead by the time most of us were born. Stalin is gone and the Russians are our "friends" now. Rwanda was far away and we don't know any of those people. The things our government does are generally somewhat less bad than the things those governments did, which makes constitutional provisions that impede tyranny start to look more like the proverbial bear-repelling rock rather than the cause of that fact.
And it wasn't so long ago that some hell-bound sons of bitches made a permanent modification to the New York City skyline. Which tempts us to forget the millions who have died at the hands of bad governments in order to avenge the thousands who died in the towers.
People want simple solutions. The FBI says they want X. They say X will help the FBI catch terrorists. But it will also help the Chinese government catch dissidents. It will help dictators catch revolutionaries. It will help terrorists and foreign governments conduct espionage. The FBI doesn't tell you that part.