General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Now will people believe me when I say we live in a de facto police state? [View all]onenote
(42,690 posts)Why wouldn't I. You may not realize it or want to admit it, but things are better today than they were in the not too distant past. They got better then, have backslid somewhat, but there's no reason to think they won't improve.
How can I say things are better today? Do you think cops didn't kill African Americans in the past or look the other way? Well, consider that during the first ten years of my father's lifetime, almost 500 African American were lynched. Police brutality against African Americans? Sadly it was as common as the sunrise in the Jim Crow south of my lifetime. Federal efforts to step in where the state and local governments would not were of middling effect -- convictions were rarely obtained. After the Feds indicted 18 individuals in the murder of Goodman, Chaney and Schwermer in 1964, only seven convictions were obtained, the longest sentence served was 6 years and the local sheriff was one of those acquitted.
Consider that until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 passed -- during my lifetime -- registration of African Americans to vote in southern states was miniscule. Within three years of the law's enactment, registration was over 50 percent and the number of African American elected officials increased from single digits to well over 150. Are there efforts underway to roll back this progress? Yes, and they should be opposed tooth and nail and I do think, in time, the pendulum will swing back.
And consider that life in these United States, while far from perfect and getting less so in some quarters every day, is better for women, for gays, and for a variety of other groups who have been discriminated against, harassed and sometimes killed simply for being who they are.
So again, I absolutely believe that there are trends in this country that need to be reversed; I also absolutely believe that they will be. And I believe that saying that we have become a police state diminishes the horrors that African Americans and other groups have been subjected to in the history of this nation and diminishes the progress made over the course of the nation's history, current setbacks notwithstanding.