Is Florida's Mandatory Evacuation a Boiled
Frog Step Towards Police State Actions?
Rob
Kall | September 5 2004
Is Jeb Bush's Mandatory evacuation of millions
of Floridians another way to get Americans used to Fascism? I spent a year
living in Florida. We had some nasty, blow the mailbox off the wall hurricanes.
Store shelves were cleared of bottled water, tape to protect windows, flashlights
and batteries. But the governor back then and the local police didn't decree
mandatory evacuations. They strongly recommended that people evacuate but
they never said people had to leave, except, perhaps, for a handful of people
at maximum risk.
Then there's the cancellation of all flights in the area,
reminiscent of the days following the 9/11 attacks. Of course there's the
practical choice of the airlines to protect their inventory and because
people are not flying in to Florida. But there's also the repetition of
the high level of irregularity. One could argue that the hurricane is the
cause. And maybe I'm just paranoid, but there is also the possibility that
these drastic measures are warm-ups to desensitize people to the steps fascists
take later. Also, these drastic emergency measures contribute very nicely
to the right wings "keep them scared and frightened, feeling threatened"
strategy of maintaining the focus on danger, terror and safety.
Maybe it's because I just read Elie Wiesel's classic book,
Night, which tells of Wiesel's life under the Nazis, from living in a small
village to seeing his mother and sister taken off to the ovens of Auschwitz
to his rescue from a concentration camp, after watching his father die.
So, when I see the news that Jeb Bush has ordered the Mandatory
Evacuation of millions of Floridians, I think of the tens of millions of
Jews and Poles who were loaded on cattle cars. I think of the boiled frog,
that allows itself to be cooked to death as the temperature is gradually
turned up.
There are so many ways that the Bush administration has
taken on the aura, followed the pattern and path of Hitler and the Nazis.
In my little exercise in paranoid conspiracy theory, an
emergency would be declared. It might start in a small blue state, or it
might be national. Most TV networks would be commanded to stop broadcasting,
or commandeered and taken over. Fox news would become the "official"
news source in the time of "emergency." Twenty four hour Curfews
would be ordered and all citizens would be required to have special IDs
or passes to go out at all. Only people with "priority IDs" that
would only be issued to the party loyalists would be allowed to purchase
gasoline.
A new sedition act would be passed, in the name of the
"emergency" of course. It would allow the police to arrest political
dissidents who were "eroding the national unity and strength"
or "attacking the stature and nobility of the Commander in Chief."
I'd be one of the early ones to be picked up, and you, since you're reading
my seditious writing, would also be at risk. If I didn't make it to Canada,
I would end up in Guantanamo or one of the hundreds of prison camps the
government has ready to activate, in the case of an "emergency."
Maybe I'm just paranoid, but it seems that the right wing
and it's corporatocracy is gradually changing laws and policies so our rights,
freedoms and democracy itself are all being encroached upon and perhaps
in dire danger. The MANDATORY evacuation orders should be challenged. Letting
them pass will make it easier to boil the frog of democracy. We are letting
our precious nation's constitutionally endowed freedoms slip through our
hands. We must do all we an to save them.
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