To Protect and Serve?

This is the new face of democracy in America. This unidentified 84 year old woman was pepper sprayed in Seattle yesterday as jack booted thugs broke up a peaceful demonstration against corporate and political greed.
Can you imagine what thoughts were racing through her mind as she was assaulted for expressing her right to assemble and peacefully protest?

She must have been wondering; as I sometimes do myself; what happened to the country in which I was born? When did the jackals take over? How did we let this happen? Did we become so liberal that we pose a threat to the powers that be? And just who makes that determination anyway?

From New York's Zuccotti Park, all the way to Seattle, the country is abroil with discontent. And, rightfully so. We have become the prisoners of a greedy class of people, who think it is all about them. From golden toilets on Wall Street; and golden parachutes to match; all the way down to the "noveau riche", who will be gobbled up right after the middle class becomes extinct, there is a savage fight brewing to decide just who we are, versus who we want to be, as individuals, as well as a nation.

And, if it is true, as spoken by such luminaries as, Winston Churchill, Pope John Paul II, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Harry Truman, that "Any society, any nation, is judged on the basis of how it treats its weakest members; the last, the least, the littlest", then I'm afraid we have come painfully short of the mark, as evidenced by this photo. It should serve to galvanize the nation to the dangers confronting it by the forces of greed and self-interest. It is not all about "me", or "you", it is about "us", together, standing up for what we know is right. And pepper spraying this 84 year old woman, along with the rest of the protesters, was clearly wrong.

There will be a reckoning next year, and there will be violence in the streets, just as there was during the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. And just like that sorry chapter in our history, which has been described as a "police riot", I fear that we will once again witness the sorry spectacle of authority waging war on its own citizens. The irony in it all, of course, is that they will be beating us with the very things which we, as tax payers, bought them after 9/11, to protect us from those who would do us harm.