Divides

Below is a photograph of a happy cop.

He's happy because at the end of a trying day, his team accomplished its mission; a suspected murderer had been arrested. He's also happy because behind him, a crowd of local residents, whom he thinks he “protects and serves,” is applauding him and his comrades for a job well done.

That doesn't often happen. As Gilbert & Sullivan wrote as long ago as 1879 (when cops generally were a good deal better liked than today), “A policeman's lot is not a happy one.” But these residents of Watertown, MA were glad, on the evening of April 19^th 2013, that the team had succeeded, and they showed their appreciation, and the cops lapped it up. However politely their victims may interact at a traffic stop, they must know full well that under the surface, there is deep resentment simmering; but here, spontaneous applause broke out.

The grateful citizens had been under house arrest all day, and while after the event Governor Patrick called the lockdown a “request,” this video clip shows vividly how voluntary was the imprisonment. Architecture and uniforms aside, there is no ready way to show that this invasion was not a film of Nazi Jew-hunters rooting out a victim for the gas chambers in 1943.

And yet the prisoners were grateful to their captors, and thanked them heartily. I cannot recall another example of that taking place, anywhere or ever. The photo above graphically portrays “the sanction of the victims.” Some of us are horrified at the gratitude shown; a majority, I suspect, would have joined the applause. This is the great divide of our era.

That the cop was happy should not surprise us. Government people are human beings, and experience the same range of emotions that we all do. In fact, “government” doesn't really exist; there are only the people working for it. When those have been shown how utterly evil is the entity that employs them and quit in disgust, it will vanish. But the sanction of their victims should surprise us. It appalls me.

So the following day, I posted a comment to a major newspaper's site that began, “On Friday evening, the police were applauded in Watertown. I'm less impressed.” You can follow the resulting interaction of comments here, but that one drew 28 “recommendations” which was almost the highest score on that fast-moving page.

The divide is between those who trust or at least tolerate such government thuggery, and those who fear and oppose it. It's a useful test, of where someone presently stands.

The divide is an infinitely more important issue than the one that so easily distracts so many on the right side of it: whether or not there was some kind of conspiracy afoot, a false flag job. Perhaps there was; I'm astonished, for example, that this photo shows Dzhokhar Tsarnaev upright, climbing out of David Henneberry's boat on his own, without assistance, despite reportedly suffering four life-threatening bullet wounds as well as exhaustion, thirst and hunger, after being shot at through the boat's fiberglass hull in a fusillade that turned it, in the owner's phrase, into “Swiss cheese”--and right after being stunned by several “flash-bang” grenades designed to subdue him. I too have a boat, and to leave it while high on the trailer is not a simple matter when perfectly fit; I usually stoop to get a hand hold on some part of the gunwale, to steady myself. So what gives? Plenty of other questions are not being answered, due to the usual arrogance of government spokesmen, so theorists are no doubt busy constructing conspiracies as I write.

That doesn't matter. Even if the entire Marathon murder scene was scripted by the FBI from soup to nuts so as to keep us all scared and dependent on those happy cops (whom Henneberry actually rescued from an embarrassing failure), it's not the point. The point is to dismantle government altogether, so that it no longer creates motivation all over the world for victims to retaliate against American targets, or ever again invades our homes.

There are those of us who are working to accomplish that, and there are those who are standing aside and doing little or nothing to help – or who are even pouring scorn on the attempt, as "nattering nabobs of negativism."

That's another great divide of our time.

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