This past weekend I posted a brief comment online about a San Francisco police officer who shot an unarmed, wheelchair-bound man in the testicles with a shotgun. Twice.
The incident was recorded on video and posted to YouTube by a man who witnessed the entire confrontation. In the video, the cop can be seen aiming his shotgun at the wheelchair bound man's groin the entire time, while the man holds a knife and sits in his wheelchair in the middle of the street. After the man complies with the police officer's orders to drop the knife, THEN the officer fires two shots from his shotgun, one into each testicle.
The man videoing the incident says, "What the fuck?! That was unnecessary!" He is outraged, as any decent citizen would be at seeing such a blatant violation of the public sense of decency. Sexual assault and possible castration using a deadly weapon is nearly impossible to justify under any circumstance, let alone when used twice in a row against a man in a wheelchair who has complied with police orders and thrown his weapon away. Yet over the past 20 years or so, government law enforcement agencies across the nation, local and federal, have increasingly used military combat techniques of sexual assault and castration freely and without any restraint against their own citizens, the ones they are supposedly sworn to "serve and protect".
More and more libertarian organizations are protesting this rise in the militarization of the police, exposing the steady increase in police use of deadly combat techniques against ordinary citizens who are clearly not enemy combatants professionally trained to fight and kill.
The tired excuse given by lawmakers is that police abuse of the citizens basic human rights and violations of the public sense of decency in the form of sexual assaults, tortures and castrations "saves lives" and therefore cannot possibly be wrong.
The police excuse is always that the police overuse of force, coupled with genital torture and sexual assaults that simply cannot be excused under the circumstances in which they are committed, is justified in order to "minimize the risk of injury to the officers themselves".
In other words, now that we have a smaller, more feminized police force, that police force must increase its use of cruelty and abuse of power because too many of the new smaller, weaker cops might sprain a shoulder or pull a muscle. Most of our new more-politically correct officers simply aren't capable of dealing with ordinary American citizens without castrating them first, preferably from 20 feet away using a gun of some sort, often against an unarmed and frequently nonviolent schoolboy or stumbling drunk old man.
I made a one-line comment on the internet about the obvious injustice of this. And the response I received was all too typical.
"If you do what the police tell you to then they won't have to shoot you in the balls."
I want to examine a few of the many reasons why the people who respond to abuse of power and tyranny in this way are idiots. And you tell me if I'm right or wrong, OK?
1) This point-of-view assumes that every police officer is always in the right under any and all circumstances, and that anyone who merely questions this assumption is deserving of a very public cruel and unusual punishment of the exact sort the ancient Roman Empire used in order to terrorize male subjects into submission, and of the exact sort our Founding Fathers expressly prohibited, having seen how it lends itself to tyranny and cannot exist in the absence of tyranny. Even the average police veteran does not hold this view, as they have seen for themselves far too many bad cops and abuses of power.
2) This point-of-view assumes that we are subjects, not citizens whose opinions and collective sense of decency is the basis for all laws and all authority granted to law enforcement, especially laws governing sexual crimes and sexual violence. And that is wrong.
3) This point-of-view places all power and authority in the hands of a very small and heavily armed group of fellow citizens, giving them more power over the life and liberty of every other citizen than even our courts and President have. And it allows no means of limiting that power or objecting to its abuse. After all, if you object, you can simply be shot in the balls and possibly killed by your very public castration and subsequent rapid blood loss. What better way to silence those who dare to question a tyrant? It worked for Caesar and it worked for Saddam Hussein, so it must be good enough for America, too.
My father used to say with a laugh that we here in The South give the police "a little leeway" to abuse criminals in order to get the job done. He was only referring to police brutality directed at black people, by the way, but as he at that time did not really view black people as human beings, he did not see how applying a cattle prod to a man's testicles or stripping him naked and beating him to death in his front yard in front of his children and neighbors simply for not doing what he was told as quickly as the officer felt he should might be a problem. As long as the abuse of police authority and power was limited to "those people" and did not affect us, that meant it was OK.
My father eventually changed his views on this after he retired from the Government and began studying the Christian Bible. Once he began to see every human being AS a human being, he no longer felt that such abuses were acceptable or excusable. Studying the Bible and subsequently seeing all people as human beings also seemed to open my father's eyes to the fact that no one should ever have the authority or power to so blatantly violate our most basic of human rights, because what is done to a few of us may eventually be done to all of us if we don't fight this evil as soon as it arises like the aggressively growing cancer that it is.
For the most influential organizations in the United States, I can only theorize why they all remain silent as this steady increase in sexual violence against males spreads and grows. But the one that puzzles me the most, the one that has remained totally and completely silent throughout all of this in violation of their own principals, is the Christian Church.
The Bible itself makes clear that God instructs all who follow him to view violence directed at the genitals as an abomination, an act without excuse, and that those who engage in this sort of sexual violence should be shown no mercy. That this is even mentioned at all in the Bible, and in such harsh terms, should be reason enough for anyone who claims to be a Christian or an Orthodox Jew to protest this type of abuse and demand that it be dealt with extremely harshly under the law. And yet despite warnings from experts on sexual violence declaring that we have an exploding epidemic with consequences that will hurt us all in the long run, The Church has said not one single thing.
There is no excuse for that.
It must be OK if the police do it
I do want to clarify that I don't hate cops in general. We have to have cops. But I do hate much of the training and instruction they are receiving these days which either encourages or flat out instructs many of them to do cowardly, despicable and inexcusable things in circumstances that simply cannot justify those actions. For example, the Delaware County sheriff's department, in Philadelphia, instructed all their deputies to aim their "less than lethal" weapons, such as the Taser, at the groins of men whenever possible. They are currently in court over this because one outraged male victim has sued.
I do hate lawmakers who refuse to do anything about this exploding problem when it is brought to their attention. And I hate lawyers whose only concern is minimizing the chances of a costly lawsuit, and thus instruct the use of despicable acts which so emotionally and physically devastate their victims that they rarely have the strength left to fight for their rights in court by suing. And most of all, I hate people like those who inspired this post, who sit happily yet stupidly by and dismiss any objections to this abuse with mindless bumper sticker slogans and idiotic dogma. Ignorance is not always bliss. Sometimes it destroys the lives of a great many people.
The video:
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