In the eye of the tiger

What constitutes a police state?
If you look at history, there's a whole lot of examples. In some cases, this brand of government has gone hand-in-hand with other things which humans do to humans - oh so well.

Police states in other cases have led to mistreatment, despair, protests, long-simmering hatred and the killing of innocents, numbering into the thousands - and some cases , the millions. I have personally stood knee deep in letters and cards requesting the release of political prisoners, emptied and left to rot in the corridors of a parliament building in a third-world capitol.

We, as a species, kill and cause pain on an epic scale. More tired examples, but certainly more terrible, come to mind. Do I really need to enumerate them - to list them here? If I do, will you not simply stop reading - not because these things are not fact, but because they are so familiar? Isn't it sad that they should be?

Sadder still is the ability of humans to lose sight of things when they are indeed right before them. It is like some small monkey from prehistory, out of the trees and standing in the tall grass for the first time. The tiger is close enough that his breath can be felt, yet because the monkey's pattern-recognition is poor, he can't see the predator. And so, he is a small brunch snack, his DNA is not passed forward, and that is probably good, because if it were, millions of myopic monkeys would exist only as tiger food.

Similarly, we today are having a pattern-recognition problem. Consider the tiger that stands before us. It is a top-heavy, muscle-bound creature built for only one purpose - to eat us. The current administration has all the money it will ever need (it's printing it). It has control of the press. It has all the power it will ever need, and if nothing changes, it will conclude with a situation not unlike what New York currently has - a version of Bloomberg, the perpetual mayor. Those who have read the articles I have written over the past year, understand that the last ingredient for a civilization lost - is the suspension of term limits. At that point, you have a dictatorship.

But I have begun to wonder if we don't already have that. Consider our own personal tiger once again. How many details of the Gulf BP oil spill, are being allowed to meet the public eye? BP private security is working so closely with Homeland Security in the South, that many reporters have confused the two. Some have been threatened, their persons and belongings searched and seized. While the management of the actual disaster was practically non-existent, the management of the on-scene locale following the alleged end of the disaster is total and comprehensive. The story - the facts, and the very history and data surrounding the event are being sifted and scrubbed and the rights of average citizens simply don't matter. Those rights haven't mattered since a guy named Joe, asked a guy named Barrack a simple question - they probably haven't mattered for years, and because of our bad eyesight, we haven't really seen it.

Kings love that. They enjoy total power, and they don't have to listen to, or even see the suffering of their subjects. Dictators love that, too. They just exterminate and bury whoever gets in their way.

Tigers have always loved it.

All predators enjoy their spot at the top of the food chain. And sometimes, they enjoy it so much, they just live to kill.

Remember that.