As the pop media continually prattle about an invisible viral enemy the threat of which is impossible to pin-down because CDC infection numbers have been undercounted, it’s good to recognize a real enemy to one’s livelihood and liberty. And residents of the Big Apple – as well as to anyone watching events there – surely can see a nemeses in New York Mayor, Bill “Big Billy” de Blasio.
After sweeping down like a male Valkyrie to break-up a Jewish funeral in Williamsburg last week, Billy evidently wasn’t through playing authoritarian. On May 1, he proceeded to threaten people who might dare take their own fates into their own hands and – GASP – go out and get close to one another, making sure his police force was ready to hit the streets to stop that evil of voluntary interaction. Said Police Chief of Department Terrance Monahan:
We are past the point of warnings. This is a dangerous situation.
"It started out as a social distancing enforcement." – NYC Police Commissioner Dermot Shea
— Jason Howerton (@jason_howerton) May 4, 2020
I honestly can't believe the things I'm seeing happen in America.pic.twitter.com/0mFquAm4Iz
Just how dangerous, not a single person in any office of any level of government can tell anyone, because, as stated before, it’s impossible to know, but that’s okay, DeBlasio and NY Governor Andrew Cuomo have taken it upon themselves to decide for everyone else how dangerous things are (or could be), they’ve taken it on themselves to decide which livelihoods are “essential” and which are “non-essential”, and they’ve ordered people to stay in unless they have a reason for escape that the politicians deem sufficient to warrant the scraps of freedom they feed people.
Are folks to be licensed to walk outside? Shall politicians issue us doggie tags to go for strolls? Are we at that state now?
Evidently, in NYC, they’re close, because over the weekend, tax-funded NYPD police swarmed like locust over public parks and other “open spaces” to enforce the previously mentioned threat about “social distancing.”
As temps climbed into the 70s, more than 1,000 NYPD officers made their presence known across the five boroughs as they enforced state social distancing mandates requiring masks and at least six-feet of space between people to contain the spread of the killer bug.
No reports as to whether the men of the tax-funded “Thin Blue Line” carried measuring sticks. But they had batons. And they had Tasers, and they had guns – guns that the Mayor doesn’t want the human mutts he’s corralled to have in their own possession.
There appears to be an impossible-to-balance imbalance there – something that didn’t go unnoticed by the people Big Brother Billy’s police harassed.
‘It’s Orwellian to be watched like this,’ one freaked-out 36-year-old park-goer told The Post as she tried to enjoy the sunshine at Staten Island’s Clove Lakes Park.
Who would have imagined that New York would become Air Strip One.
‘It’s friggin’ nuts,’ she huffed of the patrols of NYPD cars, park police officers and bike cops — whose helmets were equipped with video cameras… ‘It’s like something out of “1984,”’ she continued, referencing George Orwell’s dystopian classic. ‘What is this, a military state now?’
Yes, it is.
But what many Americans who believe they live in the “Land of the Free” don’t discuss is that all states are police states. That is the nature of the state. It is a non-voluntary, coercive institution, fed by funds taken upon threat of arrest by the very police said tax funds pay for supposed “protection”. When Orwell wrote “1984”, he was merely taking that coercive process to its logical next step, exposing the mindset that propels it, and exposing the hypocrisy of the people who command it.
It is up to us to recognize the danger inherent in the state and know that all states are police states, by definition.
And it is up to us to see the double-standards of those who tell us they are attached to the polis to “help” or “protect” us, when, in fact, they are part of an edifice that looms over us, part of a system of predation that always threatens us and can only exist by taking from us even as it tells us it is there to protect.
Such hypocrisy was on grand display as the tax-funded police hassled people in the parks their own taxes paid to maintain and as the great Mayor stood his ground like a too-noisy preacher, even after committing the same exact sins for which he would castigate others.
Indeed, just seven days prior to sending out his officers to surveil and separate innocent people – just seven turns of the Earth – Bill DeBlasio and his courageous wife were on the streets…
Posing for a photo op with a hundred, or more, medical workers outside Kings County Hospital Center.
And as they approached the tape-marked “X” on the tax-supplied sidewalk where they were supposed to stand for the best photo opportunity, and as the tax-subsidized workers applauded (no social distancing, with masks, but no gloves), as reporters shot video and took pictures…
Not one police officer broke them up. Not one cop “warned them” or told them how “dangerous” it was to be so close together.
Not one.
Just something to keep in mind.
Because the state has its favorites.
And the average people whose earnings are sucked away to feed government aren’t among them.