Opinion/Editorial

WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?

This new ‘training’ phenomenon called ‘warrior police training.’ What do you get, as a member of a social enforcement team or the team itself, if you decide that your million-strong combinations of police agencies have 328,000,000 million citizens that used to be regular people, friends, family, or even just civilians hanging around, are the enemy? That you have to be afraid of them at every encounter?

There is this new thing out, since 2019, called “Police Warrior Training,” and another selfish calculating bastard is making a fortune off of it, at the expense of everyone in America. Here’s the latest write-up on this clown and his ‘training,’ so far: “Warrior-style training takes a fear-based approach to policing that prioritizes officer safety over community safety by conditioning trainees to view all encounters as inherently dangerous. The most well-known examples are offered by retired Lt. Colonel Dave Grossman and his Grossman Academy.”

This kind of rotten training and preparation that leads to direct confrontation, invariably, there’s the mess up in Minnesota to prove it. One million police officers in the U.S. cannot ‘fight’ 328 million of the newly designated ‘enemy.’ Even throwing in all of the militaries together the count only goes up to four million…again, do the math. With all these unemployed, fearful, hungry and very angry citizens just waiting for something, anything, to do, what is presented to them for ‘entertainment?’ Minneapolis. And more cities and states, if escalation sets in. The National Guard has already been activated up in Minnesota. Normally, that might be the end of it, and maybe, hopefully, that will end the looming nightmare now, but not necessarily, by any means. Escalation can turn into insurgency just as quickly and violently as this ignition of chaos, created by the loss of life of just one person, bloomed out of seeming nowhere overnight. As I have been writing, the virus is not the worst killer to fear. It is us.

So, did you think, when I predicted that an ‘ignition point’ would set off the violence, that I was kidding two months ago? You cannot shut down the economy without shutting down, and threatening to kill, all those who are so dependent upon it for survival. Humans will fight for survival. The ignition point, or event you are watching on your television right now, is about race and police over-reaction, but the result is not racial. The result is the ignition point I discussed earlier. It is much more extensive and serious than a racial issue. It is about hunger, exposure, and the true killers of humanity over time. This is the beginning, and I so hope the police, political and military entities of our country do not over-react to allow this nightmare to grow and prosper to the point that we are all hurt seriously, and possibly terminally, by its effects. The virus is, and was, nothing in comparison. The reaction to the virus may touch us all in so many ways, however, and that ‘touch’ may be laced with substantial pain, or worse.

The testing sites in Wisconsin have fallen on hard times. Nobody is going to be tested anymore. What happened? Only a week ago the few testing sites were overwhelmed by cars lined up and people waiting for hours to be tested. What happened was the media. The new effort to appoint, hire, or whatever, hundreds of thousands of tracers have begun and the potential effects of that hiring have begun to sink in. It’s one thing to be found to be positive after testing, especially for those with no symptoms. It is quite another to turn in one’s friends to be quarantined. These are tough relationship times if you haven’t noticed. The last thing that needs to happen in most people’s lives in America today is to lose what close friends they might have.

The logic of turning in associates, fellow workers, friends, and family so that these people can be put in (at first) voluntary quarantine in their homes for weeks on end, is going to have an effect on relationships, and this is not escaping most people. If those ‘turned in,’ or snitched on, cannot afford to be quarantined, then how do you think they are going to feel about the person who turned them in and got them quarantined in the first place? As I wrote much earlier, when tracing was just an idea and not a new applied social and legal force, is turning in names over to a tracer, not a practice that might serve one well if you gave the tracer a list of enemies instead of those close to you? This is real life out here, not some sort of idyllic result of rose sunshine – induced vacation play. This tracing thing is already starting to have an effect, but, like so much of the reaction to the virus has already proven, the results of applied actions to stem the virus or hold back the spread of it, where any of this is going to go over time is almost impossible to predict, but be assured that friendly, open and self-sacrificing cooperation is not going to be a huge part of it.

~~~James Strauss

 

 

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