3/16/20 was the day the nation locked down for 15 days to slow the spread. Once you give a national security state the power to lockdown (or anything else), it never relinquishes it. From el gato malo at boriquagato.substack.com:
we have met the enemy, and they are us
while perhaps the US is a democratic republic in form and theory, in terms of function it has devolved into something far less suited to human flourishing.
america has elevated, enabled, and become largely captured by a bureaucratic security apparatus whose raison d’être was purported to be fighting wartime threats.
but the war machine does not exist to produce victory.
the war machine exists to produce war
and it has brought this warfare home.
and this is not a beneficial state of affairs.
for war is permission to think the unthinkable and excuse to do that which is inexcusable.
and as this mission has become increasingly constant and expanded into manifold realms of peacetime and peaceful lives, this “security apparatus” has become something altogether different.
it has become a self-perpetuating power base and power structure all its own and this “hidden empire” has come to wield more and more durable influence than the elected officials that give it a patina of credibility and a mask behind which to hide.
Color revolutions, water boarding, fweedom fwies, hory shet!