I am just come from the shores of the Old World, that stalwart mass whence many Americans trace their blood. I arrived still entrenched in the cold and calculating mindset in which I have spent many nights in the past seven years, a mindset of constant vigilance and persistent distrust for mister John Law. There I strode through the cobbled lanes of Amsterdam, that fine city on her Graachten, crop-dusting smoke, always changing locations, the senses trained for any sign of police, trapped in a latent and deep-seated modus operandi that had kept me (relatively) clear of the law for some time. Only slowly and via repeated conversation did I shed this fear and come to look on the cops as many Europeans do, as a bothersome but largely benevolent force tasked with assisting and serving the population.
Do we look on the police in these fine United States in the same way? Would you, as a pennyless beggar or down-on-his-luck fellow approach the cops and expect a sandwich and a warm place to sleep at night? Would you do as you pleased, pissing in the street and making a ruckus at all hours in a residential neighborhood, if you knew a police station were within the radius of a thrown stone? In the US, people do such things, but, ere long, they find themselves approached, questioned, or apprehended by the police. In Europe (at least in the larger cities), all these things are done regularly, in broadest day and darkest night, freely and without a second thought.
For lack of a less grand statement: What have we done to ourselves and to our country? Why have we acquiesced to injustices stemming from the Patriot Act and similar legislation designed to make us safer, sacrificing our liberty at the alter of a delusional sense of security? I am a sounding board in some ways, a shape-shifter who changes according to the immediate social surroundings, adjusting myself to the situation at hand, taking on the mores, hopes, and fears of those around me; and a few weeks into my stay, I realized that I had taken on the subtle fears of the greater American population, adjusted to the suspicions that pervade our land, acquiesced to the notion that the police are something to fear, that they have some sort of power over my state of mind, over my Happiness.
In this, I have erred grievously.
Again, I have erred grievously.
It is not for us to live in fear of the police, to hide our passions, to refrain from doing the things which give us joy or satisfaction, always keeping out a watchful eye for the uncouth, reporting to supposedly higher authorities that which we do not understand. My hat goes off to the brave men and women who wear their hair differently, who have tattoos, who dress in colorful thread, for those who are stared at when they walk down the street or followed through grocery stores.
We speak of freedom in this country, but I suspect that all this talking stems from the fact that we know, deep down, that our freedoms are being taken from us one by one, that we conform to the drugs society wants us to take so as not to draw attention, drugs that our states sell to us and allow to be sold, that this once free land is no longer that, but has become something altogether different.
I weep for my country, for these United States of America, for I have drunk of the nectar of a truly liberal society, and, having done and ingested and worn and said what I pleased, I have returned and seen with new eyes an increasingly militarized society, armed soldiers in train stations, police on every block, even the small towns riddled with cops, their gazes hard and menacing.
Is this the country our forefathers envisioned, a country marbled with fear of the unknown and of the unknowable (the true extent of a person's mind), a country that forces grandmothers from their wheelchairs to be frisked, a country where sickness (addiction) is treated as a crime, where the consumption of a freely-growing plant can land you behind bars?
We speak of our freedoms. We speak of the greatness of our country. And yet our prison are filled to capacity, our police officers have automatic weapons, and our new national past-time is, of all the lame and pointless things, shopping.
Recently, federal officers, agents representing the state, attempted to force me into confessing to a crime I did not commit. Although they did not use physical force (beyond detaining me for a short period of time), only methods of coercion and intimidation, I fear now that was my last straw, that point at which I had finally had enough, the point at which I am ready to leave these verdant shores in search of more liberal pastures. For when a Son of the American Revolution, a man with the shield of the American Union inked indelibly into his flesh, a 9-11 volunteer, when that man, after a brief repose to foreign lands, upon his return no longer feels at home in the country he loves and yearns for those distance places, it is at that time that his government has failed him, failed the very people for whom they are supposed to bring into existence Safety and Happiness (according to the Declaration of Independence, our society's bedraggled and ignored blueprint).
Shining Liberty has been cast out into the darkness; Restriction and Suspicion have taken her place at the nation's table.
In our modern America, we are not free in the sense of true liberty, no matter how much we try to convince ourselves to the contrary. We have allowed our government to fail us, and have made a mockery of our once fine society, preferring a torn umbrella of supposed security to the cleansing downpour of freedom.
Woe is unto the world, our nation is dying at the core.
May we find some way to save her. Hold out, fair Columbia, for all may not yet be lost.
Ultima Ratio Regum.
John Paul Roggenkamp
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