this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2023
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Too real.
I was traveling back into the US by car after vacationing with family in Mexico. I was arrested at the border by the US CBP. Almost a dozen officers pointing their guns at my car. They handcuffed me and took me to a detention center. A big room with a metal bench lining the while. My ankle was shackled to the bench. They held me there for 4 hours. Had to use the bathroom with cameras on me. The room filled up with a couple dozen people. There was a 12 year old kid next to me, also shackled to the bench. There were mothers with babies. The USCBP officers cracked jokes like "welcome to the party" in reference to the large number of people in the room. I was terrified because they told me nothing and I had no idea how long they were going to keep me there. At one point they talked about moving people to another detention center, and I was worried I would be one of those people. The rest of my family had entered the US already and had no idea I had been arrested, they thought I was on my way home.
I filed a redress with US DHS. The response I got back was that they couldn't tell me why I was arrested. Reached out to my US representatives, response was basically that US CBP has "wide latitude" to do what they want.
This is one of many reasons why I got off of opiates. I spent a lot of time worrying about saying/ doing the wrong thing and winding up in jail. Then I’d detox in jail.
About 5 months after I got off of opiates I recorded some police officers arresting a man. At one point like 4 officers had this man on the ground and one officer started punching him. I started shouting at the officers that they had the man on his stomach. They didn’t have to punch him.
One of the officers approached me and told me to leave. I can’t begin to tell you how good it felt to tell him that I didn’t have to leave and wasn’t going to leave. I was fully prepared to go to jail over speaking up for a man I never met.
It’s a god damn shame the amount of freedom we as a society have given up for a false sense of safety.
Yeah, the whole system in America is fucked. Like, the punishment should be that you get removed from society. You lose your freedom. But we live in such a hellscape that somehow we’ve normalized treating people worse than we would treat any animal.
My friend and I were talking the other day about people saying “don’t drop the soap”. Your friend is going to prison you tell him “don’t drop the soap”. A son goes to prison and dad says “don’t drop the soap”. The person saying that is essentially saying “I hope you don’t get raped”, and somehow that’s normal.
Americans have got to rethink our punishment system.
Yeah, I mean I agree with that. This is kind of relevant to what we’re talking about. But, I hate when I see a cool thing in Japan. Because, every time I see some art installations or some cool museum thing. The first thing I think is “That would never work in America. The people here are so rude, and trashy that they’d destroy it on the first day.”
It makes me kinda sad that we don’t have enough pride in our society to want to improve it, and keep things clean and functional. To try for a better way.
As an outsider, I've never understood this reasoning.
Do American citizens really believe they can overthrow (or even coerce) their government by force? The US has the largest, most mobile armed force in the world, and has much more access to intel.
How would a band of citizens even come close to competing with that?
This is exactly my point. Do American citizens have the capacity to overthrow / coerce their government by force?
Your answer is effectively: no. Thank you.