I normally reserve this sort of crap for the weekends, but its exception time
Where in the world is this all headed? Thoughts from a yellow seat on a green tractor:
I've spent a lot of time in the last several years trying to understand what I see going on all around me. I freely admit to being a devotee of Orwell, but more because of what he leads me to than a belief that he was the greatest of seers. I've read the histories of our more or less recent past, always with an eye to understanding how despotic regimes both rose to power and fell. I take all these things to be instructive.
What is the surveillance state all about? I instinctively fear it, but then I have to ask myself, what is its purpose and where will it lead? What is going to happen to us and do we care?.
Now here is the first conclusion I came to, and its one that might surprise you. We hare not headed toward a Big-Brother style despotic takeover of the country. That simply is not going to happen.
I came to that conclusion when I realized that the sole purpose of the surveillance state is to identify any threats to it and to nullify them by the earliest and least obtrusive means. What meant was that the state was not being set up for a would-be ruler but instead was insuring the status quo. So the real point was to look at what way we are going and then to assume the state would continue, much as an arrow in flight, toward whatever end it was now aimed at and the massive use of internal intelligence was simply another tool to insure its eventuality.
It is self evident that as a nation we are much at the hands of corporate task-masters and that the trend grows by the day. Gone is the relative worker's paradise that our greatest President (FDR) and WW-II returning vets both demanded and built and in its stead we have Corporate-America. In its place we have government as the lap-dog to corporate interests and the people be damed if there is a profit to be made. I need offer up no more evidence of this than the BP Gulf oil spill, the Keystone Pipeline, and Marcellus Shale natural gas fracking to make my point. But its more than that. Its the disappearance of workplace benefits, its staggeringly low hourly wages, its the shift of the cost of retirement from the point of earnings to a mixed batch of predatory investment schemes for every individual to wade their own way through - rarely with any success what so ever.
And that is what we already are. The apparatus of the state as it is to day, with its unimaginable surveillance capability, militarized police forces at even the lowest level, and a truly dumbfounded public can't do anything but continue along the current path. So what I see as our future is a time when we are entirely ruled by an undergovernment of like-minded corporate captains with a puppet Congress, Court, and White House who's only duty is to propagate the status quo.
And that is what the NSA spying is all about, its what the Patriot Act is all about, its what the utterly unwarranted arming of our civilian police forces is all about, and its what a thousand other similar domestic atrocities are all about too. Its to let more and more fascism creep into our lives and to nip in the bud any resistance to it happening. And you know what the beauty of it is? There is absolutely no way to fight it. It know everything you do, sometimes before you even do it and even if it didn't, the fascist state is like the hydra, cutting of its head has no effect.
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with it TODAY in their daily lives? 
thinking what you are thinking. I don't know if you grew up Rural...but as a person who did...and ended up in NYC during the 60's...and went through that turmoil...I'm trying to look at this "Both Sides Now...and Inbetween.
Nice post. We need to all be going into ourselves and thinking about the values we support and those we thought we supported that have somehow turned against us and WHO WE ARE.
There are so many "Cross Currents" working that we have to deal with. But, if you sat on a Tractor Seat...and have that view from the "Ground" ...then you know that something is very wrong in the scheme of things...about the attacks on ALL of Our Lives..(that is..those who aren't the 1% who have profited so handsomely in the last 30 years).
Yeah...we need to be thinking about this.
