Opinion/Editorial
THE COMING TERMINAL DISPARITY
What happened to equal protection and equal punishment under the law in the United States of America? How did this system of supposed justice become a bifurcated mess of one system of applied law to some citizens and then another for the rest of the citizenry? Take the recent condition of Bannon, the infamous former leader of Breitbart (the online right-wing ‘news’ outlet) and close confidant of Donald Trump, and how he was criminally convicted of thumbing his nose at a U.S. Congressional Subpoena. His punishment can be up to 30 days in jail! Yes, that’s it, for pulling such a huge and public illegal stunt. Then, the court set his sentencing for October 21st. Another indication of just how broken the U.S. is…between those who have crossed over into the aristocracy (like Bannon and so many others) and regular people.
A regular person would be sentenced almost immediately following conviction. In Wisconsin, if you get arrested for the most minor of crimes, and can bail yourself out, then you must show up in court when the date comes up. If you don’t, then the “felony” crime is bail jumping, and the punishment is up to 2 years in prison. Say what? What a giant difference. Aristocracy and regular citizens, and that’s the only difference. Note the punishments being handed out to the men and women who broke down the doors and windows to enter Congress on January 6th. Check out the punishments for convictions. Once more, almost all have been charged with misdemeanors, and the time in jail they are getting generally applied to their cases? Days in jail. Days, not years. No lengthy prison sentences. Even those convicted of striking and crippling police officers defending the capital have so far gotten less than two years in prison. Think about that. In the rest of the country, the punishment for carrying around a few grams of cocaine or heroin is five to ten years, or more, to be served in a full-blown prison. This kind of unfairness eats into the very fabric of the core of honor and justice most citizens have at their cores. When that happens, they get mad, the regular citizens. This kind of unfairness becomes punishable by the voters. They go out and elect absolute idiots and mentally damaged leaders like Donald Trump to get even, which leads to the country taking another step closer to chaos, cultism, and authoritarian rule.
Looking at the culture from an anthropological view, along with paying close attention to history, the other deeply divisive break the American culture is experiencing is the divide between those who are fabulously wealthy and those who are not. Those who are not equal fully ninety percent of the population. The hundred millionaires and billionaires have a very well-established tendency to lose touch with the remainder of the public. As they lose touch their actions and communications begin to appear cold, uncaring, and selfish to the remainder of the population. Coupling this disparity with that of what is becoming apparent in the country’s system of justice, can be terminal to the culture as a whole. Many are afraid of another civil war beginning and spreading across the country.
Well, that civil war is already underway, although it hasn’t reached the shooting stage of ultimate violence yet. The civil war is one being conducted in near private silence yet through public expressions of vitriolic rhetoric. Inside families and neighborhoods, it has become almost impossible to have credible, meaningful, and peaceful discussions about the very subjects being presented in this article. The mass media will fan the flames of civil war simply because the mass media has no leadership of merit. Its function has become to raise money and the results of the messages the media covers, and spreads have become nearly hopelessly and permanently tied to tabloid-style news and near carnival ‘freak show’ public presentations. Understanding what’s happening and then taking any kind of curative action has become almost impossible for most of the population. Television and mass media, in every expression, have become less and less founded on the understanding of an audience, instead becoming dependent upon only the entertainment of that audience. How to reorient an entire public to a course of action that takes the culture back to building through the pursuit of science, the necessity of social cooperation and the sharing of the country’s vast riches is, or should be, the platform foundation for every political party and pursuit. The likelihood of that happening is almost zero, however. The only hope the country really has is the potential for enough of the citizenry to figure out what has happened and then get committed to doing something about it.
