Seven Signs of a Police State

• Mass surveillance of the populace
• Systemic censorship
• Indoctrination and propaganda in the schools and media
• A One-Party state, with control of elections
• Criminalization of dissent
• Suppression of religious liberty
• Political prisoners

Back in 2004 blogger TheGeekWithA.45 wrote in his post “The Surreality of it all…“

When I was perhaps nine or ten years old, I envisioned that the world in general and the government in particular was run by enlightened, virtuous men and women who proceeded forward in a wise and principled manner, striving to uphold lofty ideals, placing the interest of the People before the interest of the State.

{Pause to allow catcalls, smirks and hooting to die down….tapping feet….waiting patiently….looking at watch….beseeching heaven….ahem. Now I’ll continue.}

Obviously, the experiences of my life have taught me otherwise, but nonetheless, I do not begrudge my younger self’s naivete. That experience, even illusory, provided me with a precious and irreplaceable gift, something that far too many people will never have. For a few brief shining years, I was old enough to understand high ideals, and inexperienced enough to see how their implementation falls short in the world. In that state, I saw America not as it was, but as it should be, its promise completely and utterly fulfilled. The dazzle of its full glory will never fully leave my eyes.

I was right there with him. But then he also wrote:

We, who studied the shape and form of the machines of freedom and oppression, have looked around us, and are utterly dumbfounded by what we see.

We see first that the machinery of freedom and Liberty is badly broken. Parts that are supposed to govern and limit each other no longer do so with any reliability.

We examine the creaking and groaning structure, and note that critical timbers have been moved from one place to another, that some parts are entirely missing, and others are no longer recognizable under the wadded layers of spit and duct tape. Other, entirely new subsystems, foreign to the original design, have been added on, bolted at awkward angles.

We confer amongst ourselves, comparing what we see with the original blueprints, and the massive stack of tomes that are the revision manuals. We scratch our heads, and wonder if the self-corrective mechanisms, dimly seen deep in the interior maintain enough integrity to actually work. We step back, and squint, and watch the thing at work. Yes, gears are spinning, and cogs are turning, and there are interesting whoomphity whoomph sounds coming from it, but it seems that the output is pale and inferior, like grocery store branded cola.

That is not all that we see. As we pry our eyes from the shed in which our beloved old machine wheezes and coughs through the day, we notice that there is an assemblage of parts and subassemblies scattered about the green. Some of them are old, bits of flotsam and jetsam from history, and some are relatively new, having been hauled onto the commons to deal with recent events. Some of them are already turned on, and are spinning away, while others churn over only occasionally.

We’ve seen them there before, but we’ve never really SEEN them in quite the way that we see them now. Lately, they’ve been shuffled around a bit, as if to be assembled into something new. The way they have been shifted around suggests a purpose. The way they lay they all line up in a certain manner.

We who understand the forms and shapes of these things are alarmed. We recognize those shapes, and what they would become if pushed together, connected, and powered up.

We’ve seen them before.

We know the tools and mechanisms of oppression when we see them. We’ve studied them in depth, and their existence on our shores, in our times, offends us deeply. We can see the stirrings of malevolence, and we take stock of the damage they’ve caused over so much time.

Others pass by without a second look, with no alarm or hue and cry, as if they are blind, as if they don’t understand what they see before their very eyes. We want to shake them, to grasp their heads and turn their faces, shouting, “LOOK! Do you see what this thing is? Do you see how it might be put to use? Do you know what can happen if this thing becomes fully assembled and activated?”

RTWT.