Two Chills

I saw two things yesterday that gave me chills.

One happened early in the day when I was traveling through the east coast of the United States. I was driving and I looked up and I saw it, and it undoubtedly saw me.

How could it not? That is what it is designed to do.

It was the stuff of fiction, of dream, and perhaps more truly… nightmare, made real, made concrete… made manifest.

In fiction you would have called it perhaps the Eye of Sauron, if Tolkien’s lore holds sway, or perhaps Big Brother, if Orwellian references are not lost on a world moving dangerously sideways. But in fact it was more amazing and horrific than both those references.

We sometimes do not realize we live in the future, are the future that endured, of a bloody and brutal 20th century, and while that is not the future yet, of flying cars and jet packs and conversing with aliens, the future we are living,… of cloning, and test tube babies, and sexual reassignment, and genetic modifications, and decision making machines designed to kill men, and engineered diseases, and ethnic cleansings, and endless wars, and information super-highway, and super social media, and entertainment systems in most homes that are one code-write away from being constant surveillance and data gathering/marketing tools, this future is as miraculous and as horrifying as any scifi tale of invasion.

It is more terrifying. Because the future we live in is plagued with countless terrors, we are not so lucky as to have a single bogeyman. No… our corporate-beholden governments create countless destroyers of man’s liberties and mankind’s lives, not just one.

I was driving and I saw something that should never float above an American city, or any city, floating there. I saw the Eye of Sauron, I say again, because it sounds romantic, but more… because it feels most true.

I saw this:

FIRST LOOK

And it is a sight that I fear that all of us will be seeing, if we do not with all oppose it. For all the talk of not abusing the rights of the people, the fact is, that is what the blimp is designed to do, its very existence over American cities is an affront to the idea of a government of the people. What I saw in the sky yesterday was Ferguson and Palestine writ large, it is a show of force, it is the act of an occupying army.

Too much to make of it? I fear its existence is proof that we have made too little of our liberties. And time is running out to make more.

And what was the 2nd thing that gave me chills? That night I watched Lawrence Olivier and Gregory Peck give blistering performances in a movie that in 1978, almost 40 years ago, was the height of fantasy, but today feels as close as the next news cycle. I’m talking about THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL.

Between facts that feel like fictions and fictions that feel like facts, the ground feels precarious, and the watchful skies… deserving of being watched.

Perhaps we should watch… together.

15 May 2014 American Flag at Half Staff

So I’m walking around downtown on my brunch break and I’m noticing all the American flags are flying at half mast.

It not being a holiday or a day of mourning I find this curious. Checking with coworkers and random gawkers I find they likewise have no idea about this incident.

Doing a bit of research courtesy of everyone’s favorite non-google search engine I turn up that today is Peace Officers Memorial Day.

President Barack Obama seemingly yesterday signed into law a proclamation establishing basically a new holiday and a police week.

Now I appreciate what peace officers do as well as the next guy, however crafting a holiday out of whole cloth, with no discussion, no public input seems… wrong. There is something wrong in its overnight inundation onto the public consciousness. Using an obscure JFK era law to fashion this doctrine from on high.

It goes against the idea of representative government, to have the governed so outside the process of government. A one day turnaround, and taadaa… new holiday.

We already have a memorial day honoring the fallen of wars foreign and domestic. This new memorial while seemingly an innocuous thing, cannot be separated from the ever more paramilitary presence that law enforcement is taking on in the communities they were once tasked with serving.

An adversarial relationship between law enforcement of all stripes and the people, that has grown only more so since the Patriot Act, and President Obama’s numerous sacrifices of liberties and freedoms in his two terms.

We are not on the verge of a police state… we are well into the first tentative days of one, and this whole cloth creation of police holidays while hopefully innocuous, is tainted by the times and is hard not to see… as a dangerous sign, a steeper slide into a nation of unquestionable authority backed by flag waving propaganda.

Or it could just be a flag at half-mast. :). I leave you to judge.