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March 20, 2003

Here's a frightening link:
Arrest Me

A friend of mine recently sent me an email saying, in essence, "Call my lawyer if I don't show up for work one day." Not that I think she's in much danger of being arrested. She and I are small fry. But you never know. I'm sure the people in the examples listed on that page didn't think they had anything to worry about.

And what about the guy who was arrested in the shopping mall for wearing a T-shirt saying "Give peace a chance" — ironically enough, a T-shirt he'd just bought in that same shopping mall!

I don't know. I'd even like to think that in Boston (or at least in Cambridge) people are more open-minded than that, and cops and other Authority Figures are too scared of the fuss that the wacky liberal-heads around here would make.

But I just don't know.

The really frightening thing about oppression, I suppose, is its tendancy to spread its focus. Today it might be the pagans, feminists, and liberals — after all, we were apparently to blame for 9-11 to begin with, according to one enlightened televangelist. Then tomorrow it'll be the moderates, the Democrats, and anyone who voted for Gore in 2000. Oh, wait, that was over half the voting public. Ah, well.

I'd like to believe that people will wake up and fight back before the nightmares start happening in the daytime, but my Inner Cynic says otherwise. And after you read too many Octavia Butler novels, you see how wrong things can really go.

And the really scary thing is that the American Public (that elusive Wonder-Bread-eating, Cheez-Whiz-shooting, Friends-sitcom-watching American Public) doesn't usually know about the shit that goes down until ten, twenty, forty years after it happens. Yes, Virginia, Japanese-Americans were sent to internment camps where they lived in stables while Good White Americans moved into their houses back in San Francisco.

I pray for peace. I know peace doesn't always happen. I know war exists for a reason, the same way poison ivy and infant mortality do. I just don't know what it is. I pray to keep my heart open, but protected. I pray that the men and women in uniform, on both sides of the borders, retain some modicum of compassion. Om namah padme hom, as the Tibetans say. Love and compassion.