A nation of many rules and much abuse. The antidote is charity.

Well, I just stumbled upon this article, linked up at Cop Block. “Woman Handcuffed During Epileptic Seizure.” Here’s the real bad thing about that news article: she was handcuffed by police officers.

911 was called because a 23-year-old was having a seizure, police showed up. They cuffed her, according to the article, and “shackled her and restrained her head. All that, her attorney said, exacerbated the seizure.”

Is that what is supposed to happen when someone calls 911? And, as the post at Cop Block asks, why did police show up at all? Maybe they had nothing better to do. They wanted to go bully someone?

Another story from the other day in the Denver Post about police officers who restrained a homeless preacher, and shocked him to death.

The man had a history of arrests. according to the article, “the habitual criminal was arrested in Denver mostly during the 1980s and 1990s for disorderly conduct, trespass, loitering, disturbing the peace, carrying a concealed weapon and threatening assault.”

That day he was charged with drug paraphernalia. Non-violent offender. Not even damn drugs — but drug paraphernalia. And he’s dead for that.

Marvin Booker just wanted to get his shoes.

But deputies at the new Denver jail told him to stop. When Booker, who was being processed on a charge of possession of drug paraphernalia, didn’t obey, he was held down, hit with electric shocks and then placed facedown in a holding cell, according to two inmates who watched it unfold.

Booker never got up. He was pronounced dead later that morning.

“I’ve never seen anything happen like that before in my life,” said John Yedo, 54, who was being processed on a charge of destruction of property and said he witnessed the scene. “What I saw is not what you’d expect to see in America.”
…
The two jail witnesses, who were both arrested in the early-morning hours of July 9 around the time Booker was being processed, were contacted and interviewed by The Denver Post separately. Both of them said they had not been questioned by police investigating the death of Booker, a homeless ordained minister who served the poor, but also a habitual criminal with a long string of arrests.

Capt. Frank Gale, spokesman for the jail, said he cannot comment on the ongoing investigation by the Denver Police Department and the Denver district attorney’s office, and cannot confirm the inmates’ accounts.

Ya, of course he can’t. Because they weren’t even questioned. And even if they were, would they really wanna talk to any of them after what they saw?

What is the deal with this sudden rash of police abuse in the news? Such stories used be pretty sparse, or so it seemed. But just the past few years — blammo. The stories are everywhere.

What’s makes it more alarming to me, is that I have actually been reading the basic new less than I used to for the past year. So I wonder how many such news articles I haven’t seen.

But there have been stories of the police arresting little children, banning reporters from following their work, using a taser on a bed-ridden old woman, and more.

And police have been busy in New York, Washington DC, and other places arresting people who dare photograph their behavior. In Detroit, Michigan, too, cameras are being banned.

Detroit police burned and shot a 7-year-old girl, accidentally — a horrible, unintentional accident. The result of carelessness.

The officers, trying to defend themselves in an investigation, claimed that they were executing a warrant to obtain a murder suspect, that he was in the same home as the little girl, that the suspect wouldn’t come out, that they needed to use a flash-bang and storm the house.

The official version of what happened was brought into question by a lawyer who managed to get his hands on a videotape showing what happened — police threw a flash grenade into the house, and then another officer fired into the house from the front porch. In the videotape, according to the lawyer, the officers do not announce themselves first.

What’s more, according to the lawyer, the man in question wasn’t even in the little girl’s house. “In fact, there’s an upstairs apartment next door which the police did not have a search warrant for and that is where he surrendered, they went into that house too. But he was not in Aiyana’s house.”

The mayor’s response? He has banned cameras. No more tv crews and camera men around the Detroit Police. Making it more difficult to obtain evidence of a problem doesn’t solve a damn problem. But it does allow for future problems to be swept under the rug.

The stories of police abuse and misconduct coming out range from police being just plain mean and abusive, to irresponsible negligence. In some cases, the result is fatal.

In all cases, there is an over-willingness toward violence.

The larger picture, to me, it that it seems that we are so busy being a so-called “nation of laws,” that we easily shrug and say “they are just doing their job” when abuse is committed by someone who happens to work for the State. And we shrug at the victims.

But I have another observation — the enforcement of rules has become the ends in-and-of themselves. We have rules for the sake of rules.

Not only do the ends justify the means in our society, we aren’t even questioning the damn ends. For example, do more rules make us more secure? I don’t think so. Quite the contract, in fact.

Just last week, John Stossel pointed out this same problem in a short op-ed. He makes the observation that we have become a nation of rules — lots and lots of rules. And damn you of you break the rules.

And there are many more rules to break than there used to be. It’s a punitive mentality that is permeating our society. We are ready to punish people, and not so willing to help them.

It’s pretty selfish, really. It’s too easy to punish someone, rather than help them. And it’s easy to call a man with a gun and a badge to force someone to do what we want, even if that person isn’t really hurting anyone. And it is easier to let the State’s system of institutionalized theft collect the taxes, than it is to donate money and goods to a charity.

We The People can either enable or disable the State. The political class only has the power that we grant them.

How do we change this trend of institutionalized aggression? I agree that the enemy, in the end, is the State. The State, after all, is the only agent that has a vested interest in institutionalized violence and suspicion and aggression. But so we combat that with hatred and rage? No.

We combat it with peace, with love, and with overwhelming charity.

Poland resisted the Soviet Union because they had a culture that valued a healthy work ethic, and charity. The American Revolution was fought by men and women who were thoughtful and charitable (in contrast to the French Revolution, which became soaked and sodden in suspicion and fear).

The antidote to the selfishness in our society, as I see it, is charity. The antidote to anxiety is charity. The antidote to anger is charity. The antidote to insecurity is charity. The antidote, I believe, to stateism is charity.

And that includes charity in the face of aggression.