Lets talk border walls...

in #freewrite5 years ago

I don't like Trump. I can't even stand to watch him on TV anymore because the news fixates on him so much. But...you know what...maybe a border wall isn't so bad...

Hold on a second, hear me out.

Extending the border wall will suck. It will mean that people's land will be cut in half. Imminent domain. The government will just take their land, with no recourse.

But, you see, it's not good now. Right now there are people in tactical vests with assault rifles and helicopters and drones. It's not cool. If a border wall would mean that they would step all that shit down, then it might be better.

But then those fighting against the border wall talk about making concessions by increasing funding for drones and I'm just like...NO!!!!!

You may have heard about the Baptist pastor that got beaten by "Border patrol", not at the border, but at an inland checkpoint.

It used to be that tourist could go to the border and cross it with ease and it was a thing to do for fun. It wasn't something where you are put under suspicion of smuggling and worried about being harassed. You didn't have to worry about your face being shoved into broken glass.

The majority of the drugs coming into the United States don't get smuggled through areas without fences. It gets smuggled in through checkpoints. Clearly something is not working. All of this harassment and abuse isn't stopping the drugs, the rapists, and the assumedly good people.

I want to live in a free and open country, where people aren't assumed to be the worst of the worst, especially because of the colour of their skin. I don't want people stopped for no good reason at checkpoints and forced to agree to a search or have their windows broken, be tazed, handcuffed, and arrested, just because they wouldn't agree to a search. The pastor in the video did nothing wrong. He simply refused to let them unlawfully search his vehicle, which should be his right. They shouldn't be able to just search whoever they want.

There are tons of people in this country that break the law every day. They imbibe drugs. They take pain killers that aren't prescribed to them, often because they are in pain. They have knives bigger than what the government deems should be allowed to be concealed. They keep loaded guns in their car, just in case, because they're paranoid, or just worried that maybe if they didn't then something could happen and they would regret not having it. They keep baseball bats in their car, just in case. They do all sorts of things that are against the law, that they could go to jail for. Hell, these days, having more money than they consider normal could be grounds for them to take it, after a search. But maybe you were just going to buy a car.

So you know what, they can build a stupid useless wall that people are just gonna tunnel under, but I'd prefer if it looked cool, like the great wall. Just as long as they get rid of the drones and the helicopters and the assault rifles and they start treating humans like humans, and assume they're innocent until they have evidence to the contrary.

We can't arrest everyone that commits crimes, nor should we, because they are normal everyday people, often good, hard working people, that just do one thing that happens to be illegal occasionally. If we arrest them all, a huge portion of our population would be in prison, and I don't think we'd even have the money to pay for it, because it would include most of our workforce. Half of our population would be policing the other half. And to even try to get to that point, we'd have to treat everyone like they were criminals already. That's what we've already started to do. We need to stop. We can't just treat people like they're criminals. We can't arrest people and then release them after we figure out that we had no evidence to begin with.

I don't want a border wall. But even more than that, I don't want to live in a police state where they act like anyone near the border could be a criminal.

Sort:  

I can understand your frustration @geekpowered. I also don't like Trump. I really don't think conceding to a border wall will help anything however. There is no reason to think the authorities would scale back any of the atrocities you mention if we had a wall. I really think we'd just add a wall to the list along with the guns and drones and thugs in helicopters. In fact it may even embolden these sort of things.

Moreover a huge portion of the population is already imprisoned compared to anywhere else on this mud ball. The United States tops the charts for incarceration in both absolute and relative metrics. An alarming portion of those prisoners are in for profit prisons too. If you think those people are not having their labor exploited every day just like the people on this side of the barbed-wire fence, think again.

We already live in a police state. These things were going on long before 2016. We need a hell of a lot more than just impeachment.

Yeah, that video of the pastor is from 2009. He's far from the only one that such things have happened to as well. There's also a ton of incidents involving police doing the same thing. Police are slightly more likely to get a backlash when they randomly search though. Most people don't even know that you have the right to say no to a search though. They agree to a search because they are faced with that imposing authority figure with a gun.

Unfortunately for the pastor, the border patrol doesn't even act on the restraints the police do. I doubt if most of them even know that you are allowed to say no to a search, because they are used to operating on the border, where such rights haven't been upheld for a long while. Border patrol and TSA have in essence been established to conduct unreasonable searches, without warrants or probable cause.

If someone is crossing the border or flying into the country and they have reasonable cause to search them, then they should...but that's not what they do. They do "random" searches in addition to searching every bag with electronic means. They even plan on installing massive scanners at every border entry that will search every car or truck, regardless of if they have probable cause.

They are completely unlikely to scale any of this back. There's not enough that are against it. And even if there were, they'd just keep screaming terrorists until they relented because they made it out like they are against America or some shit.

And yeah, a huge portion of the population is in prisons, and we do put them to work for pennies on the dollar...but if they arrested everyone that committed a crime worthy of arrest, we would all be in prison. Then they would likely have to come up with better work programs, because many people's labour is worth far more than the worthless jobs they make them do for pennies.

None of this started with this administration, or even Obama, or even Clinton. I would say it got worse under all of them in different ways. I don't know that I can point to any time in history that it started. It's pretty much always been this way in one form or another. Power corrupts and the state enforces.

Coin Marketplace

STEEM 0.36
TRX 0.12
JST 0.040
BTC 70846.59
ETH 3567.69
USDT 1.00
SBD 4.79