It’s a Sunday, and a few routine phenomena are observable. Various religions, within and without the Abrahamic tradition, enjoy worship service on this day. Many, many people, within and without Abrahamic tradition, enjoy brunch in crowded restaurants on this day. Many people, within and without, etc, etc, sleep late and do the crossword. And some people, Abrahamic-brunch-eating-crossword-doers, or no, watch the “Law and Order: SVU” marathon on the USA channel.
I have mixed emotions about my Law and Order addiction. That guy who plays Detective Eliot Stabler is a dreamy, dreamy dream. And Mariska Hargitay is the female protagonist of the NEW, new millennium. But, the show makes a number out of “taking liberties with constitutional rights” and even though these messages are couched in the persecution/prosecution of the worst, mostly white, mostly male violators, I still can’t get used to the primetime advertisement of preemptive striking against easy targets.
Blurg. What did that last (ridiculously run-on) sentence even mean?
I don’t like child abusers. or predators, pedophiles, rapists, any of ‘em. Nor do I like Dick Cheney, George Bush 1 and 2, not a big fan of Karl Rove, Ronald Reagan.
I think all of those people, predators to Reagan, are jerks. They cause harm to our communities, they injure our loved ones, they actively limit the potential of our lives and the lives of the people we care about. They cause us to be afraid.
The way we defend ourselves from this fear (assuming we are all going to keep on keeping on within these societal structures) is to demand that all of these perpetrators, whether national or neighborhood, are held to the same standards. If you get to ambush a possible child predator with TV cameras and FBI online impersonators, then you get to ambush Supreme Court judges with similar devices. Put away a neighborhood drug user, put away a presidential drug user.
The US legal system is pretty good in theory. Where it fails, it fails monumentally, but I can’t help but think that a reason for that failure is public acquiescence. If the characters on Law and Order are going to run around violating legal rights because they are SO convinced that those violations will result in an ultimate good - okay, then use those violations against the specifically named in addition to the generally suggested evil doers.
