Kort Explores conundrums of the human condition

Magicians have long known how useful it can be to distract the attention of the audience away from what they're really doing. Unfortunately, so have politicians and propagandists. The magnitude of real crimes that the American public is willing to overlook when distracted by a sordid sex scandal, or a soap opera spun around a doe-eyed child, is simply amazing.

One of the underappreciated aspects of the INS raid in Miami was what happened to the residents of the house behind the one where the targeted child was living. Claiming that the action was needed to protect the assault team attacking the private residence listed in their "arrest warrant", the agents first "secured" an entirely separate residence.

As has become standard practice in America today, the heavily armed storm troopers broke down the doors before dawn and "neutralized" those inside. They dragged the manacled residents out of their home and onto the lawn, forcing the terrified captives to publicly prostrate themselves before the black-hooded symbols of state violence.

Just what heinous crime justified depriving these individuals of their fundamental rights as freemen? What had they done to deserve having their property destroyed and their privacy violated, as well as being subjected to physical assault and public humiliation by the agents of the state?

The citizens who were rousted from their beds and prostrated on their lawn while masked agents of the state trashed their home hadn't committed a crime, let alone demonstrated that they posed a danger to the public. There was no due process, no proof of guilt before a jury of their peers. Incredibly, their sole "crime" was the suspicion that they might exercise their constitutional rights and fulfill their duties as citizens of a free nation.

The official spokesman at the scene explained that this raid on a private residence was simply a precautionary measure. The police suspected the individuals in the house might own guns. The agents were simply making sure that the suspected guns couldn't be used to resist the primary mission targeting the adjoining private residence. These citizens were violently "neutralized" because someone in the vast "law enforcement" bureaucracy thought they *might* be willing and able to resist outrageous acts by government agents. The government spokesman and the news media both treated this justification as being perfectly reasonable.

Our Constitution protects the rights of the people to both keep and bear arms. In other times, the membership of all able-bodied citizens in the unorganized national militia was recognized as extending the right to be armed into a duty to be armed. These innocent individuals were assaulted specifically because government agents suspected they might be exercising their constitutional right to keep and bear arms.

Many reasonable people are outraged at the actions of the government agents in Miami - regardless of their views on what should be done with the child who is being used to distract our attention. Our Declaration of Independence clearly states that it is the duty of freemen to resist outrageous abuses of power by government agents. These individuals were pre-emptively "neutralized" because the INS suspected they might, as free citizens, be sufficiently offended by the violations of law and court orders the INS was intending to perpetrate next door, to rise to the defense of the intended victims. The suspicion that these individuals might do their duty as citizens became the justification for the violation of their fundamental rights.

Even if the targets of this intentional violence had been guilty of some crime, the state is obligated to treat the accused as innocent until proven guilty. The building entry and suppression tactics they employed were guaranteed to at least cause property damage and substantial physical discomfort for any citizens they find inside. That is if the assault troops didn't murder the innocent citizens outright as so often happens in these kinds of paramilitary operations. The victims of this state violence hadn't been charged with a crime when government agents deprived them of their fundamental rights and destroyed their private property. There was never any intention of respecting the innocence of the targets of this violence. The specific intent of the government agents was to inflict harm on individuals they knew to be entirely innocent.

There has been a lot of noise in the press about the political damage that will result from the "mishandling" of the Elian controversy. But just as after Ruby Ridge and Waco, while the villains put on a show of embarrassment over the trivial issues that have distracted the public's attention, the major crimes they committed against the fundamental principles of freedom go unnoticed.

Did any of the citizens in Miami actually believe that the Waco mass murderers had learned the errors of their ways and abandoned violence as a means of imposing their will? Or did the unpunished mass murders at Waco succeed in intimidating the citizens in Miami into passively allowing their rights to be violated out of a well founded fear of indiscriminate mass murder by government storm troopers?

I've already heard disquieting statements in the mainstream media that since Waco demonstrated government agents would simply kill anyone who resisted, the defense of freedom was no longer a valid justification for the right to bear arms. It has even been claimed that since the mere suspicion citizens might be armed triggers such aggressive violence by government agents, a "citizen" was safer not exercising his constitutional rights. At the cost of a little contrived sadness over the "self-inflicted" deaths at Waco, the storm troopers gained a powerful psychological weapon to use against the freedom of all citizens.

Building on the lessons of Waco we now have the lessons of Miami. While the focus of public attention was distracted into thinking the controversy was about the welfare of a child, the nation was being taught that the courts had no power to restrain the violence of the storm troopers. When the courts refused to rubber-stamp their demands, the storm troopers simply resorted to violence in order to impose their will on those who dared to oppose them. And just as expected, while the storm troopers used brute force to create the reality the courts had denied them, the courts shuffled their papers and demonstrated that the law was nothing but an empty sham - a useful tool for attacking the rights of freemen, but utterly worthless in defending those rights.

Perhaps the most disturbing lesson we were taught in Miami is the redefinition of citizenship. The exercise of a free citizen's rights and duties was once a respected badge of honor. In Miami our rulers demonstrated that even the suspicion of being an honorable citizen is now considered sufficient probable cause for a predawn assault by armed and armored storm troopers. In the land of the formerly free, the exercise of freedom has been perverted into an excuse to violently subjegate those who still value their freedom. An "accidental" death at the hands of black hooded killers who will never be held accountable for their crimes awaits those unwilling to be slaves.

Once again, those who masquerade as the opposition have been making a lot of noise about "investigating" trivial distractions - while ignoring the massive crimes being committed against the fundamental principles of freedom. Once again the media is gearing up to force feed sensationalized drivel to the public until the unthinking masses get bored and tune out, totally oblivious to those few voices sounding the alarm amidst the cacophony of overhyped trivia. Once again Americans have become obsessed with meaningless trivia while refusing to notice that their fundamental rights are being stolen.