If you ask a conspiracy theorist about the recent bombing in Boston, one of the first things they may tell you is that it was set up by the government to practice Martial Law. Since I love this country and I have faith in our government to conduct itself fairly and legally, I'm willing to let the first part of that theory go. It is the second part, however, which is causing me to question what happened exactly.
If there were an untested protocol, a method of conduct for a dangerous situation how would we know it would work? Obviously, such a method must be used in practicum to rule whether or not it will work. In Boston, we saw a very intricate response to the two bombing suspects and it should cause us to think about how necessary it all was.
For those fateful days in April, people in Boston were asked to stay in their homes and lock their doors while the Federal, State, and local police hunted down the nineteen-year-old suspect. I do not believe any information on the total number of police involved, artillery, and equipment have been released, but judging by the looks of Boston for those days in question, it seems to be overkill for a single person. Yes, it is a dangerous situation and, as an acquaintance pointed out to me earlier, the last thing we would want is a manhunt in Boston's rush-hour traffic. Not to mention, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Governor Patrick, and the state and local police only asked people to stay indoors; that is to say that unless Martial Law was officially declared, the people were allowed to follow their government's suggestion at their own discretion.
This is what is so worrying to me. The day of and the days following the bombing, we witnessed how people will react to a certain type of response to terror on our own soil. Compared to 9/11, the terror at the Boston Marathon, though tragic, was a minimum; it wasn't the chaos and temporary anarchy that New York was for the weeks following the attack. New York was practically a battlefield while Boston, though in peril, was tame— well, as tame as Boston can be. Had Martial law been declared in both situations, New York would have been next to impossible to control while Boston would have been a cakewalk, and not because Boston is smaller, but because it was compliant with the requests of the government.
This is not to say that the people should not have been compliant or that they had any reason to distrust their government, though efforts to capture the culprits were drastic and perhaps over the top, it was probably just as easy allowing the police do what they do without getting in their way. My personal concern, however, is that people will grow used to allowing this anytime for anything. We must stand against violence in every form and, in avoidance of siding with either Martin Luther King Jr. or Malcolm X, suffice it to say that violence should be battled with intolerance— however you, the reader, may take that notion.
~Joe
The very nature of our country's design was to raise the bar of forward thinking-- that is, liberty, equality, and justice for all. The disagreement between the right and the left lies within what ought to be considered civil liberty and/or what we guarantee as rights to be protected through our government.
The Tea Party is a group of conservative thought who pride themselves as scholars of the United States Constitution and for defending it against the whim of the collective leftist. In other words, Tea Party people are textualists-- people who take the original document how it was written, word for word and not for what it may or may not have meant. Any claims made about the intent of the original document are promptly stomped out by the simple and indiscriminate idea that the written word means what it means as it lies written on the page.
When the liberal attempts to provide a justification for something in the Constitution-- whether provable or not-- there is a deterioration of thought and argument, thereby belief, thereby reality. The conservative will defend the Constitution by providing a textual argument from a part of it and the liberal therefore submits his own textual evidence to the contrary and it only creates confusion when we cannot conclude a winning argument because we have essentially created conflict in the Constitution itself.
The difference between the two sides is that the liberal finds a need to be inclusive while the conservative maintains that there can be no need. While we can fault the liberal for attempting to trace the original meaning of our forefathers, the conservative— who does not consider the need already being accounted for— attempts to use anything but the prejudice that rules their being to seek an end to the argument. Furthermore, we should consider the liberal at fault simply because he or she attempts to engage in the same prejudices as the forefathers (which may or may not be even worse than the prejudices of present conservatives).
In the end, both parties, both philosophies tread on a most freeing ideology by attempting to defend it. One makes the mistake of objectifying his philosophy and the other by subjecting all to his own prejudice. If nothing could not possibly possess contradiction, then the Tea Party is a group of people not interested in having a logical and practical government and society (in fact, if the Constitution was meant never to hold contradiction, then amendments would never have been possible).
The Tea Party is as much a guardian of the constitution as New York was any practical help to establishing independence from Britain. Comfort in the ways of the old makes it such an easy argument to prevent forward moving and forward thinking.
How is a nation forward moving when the ideals it is built on are immovable and non-progressive? People concern themselves with how slow the economy seems to be moving and how unproductive our political representatives seem to be on all different fronts, but no one seems interested in the notion that nothing moves because no one attempts to test both figurative and literal inertia.
The art of forward thinking is overcoming historical prejudice and that requires not a change in the Constitution, but actually defining what liberty and equality mean today. It will force those who embrace textualism to resort to none-other than their prejudices and, as Burke said, wait until the prejudice dwindles to a minority. Our current duty is not to continue our forefathers' thought, but to parallel it in the context of the present for the sake of liberty and equality.
~Joe
