Coronavirus (COVID19) Reflection #7
March 21, 2020

Can you hear the thunder? A distant thunderstorm. is on the horizon of America, but most American’s are deaf to its approach. The storm is one of violent cells, each with the potential to destroy vast segments of the population below underneath its violence. The looming problem of money. That fact was admitted in the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune and even the Milwaukee Journal this morning. What are low paid people going to do when the jobs they depended upon are gone for the foreseeable future? Not one of the three newspapers offered any kind of solution at all to this problem that is going to rise up and strike hard into the very soft solar plexus of the United States of America. Basically, all three news organizations had the same thing to write: “nobody knows, including the people who will have nothing.”

Well, I know.

Such a huge base of the population is not going to go quietly into the terrible cold night. Gun sales are off the charts and there is no ammo left anywhere. Those guns and the ammunition are not going to middle-class American families worried about roving wild biker gangs. Those guns and that ammo are going to people who are afraid, and people who are afraid can grow very dangerous indeed.

The U.S. Justice Department moved to get tougher on Friday, submitting a brief to congress that entails new rules of conduct within the justice system for the duration of the ’emergency’ and for one year after. No habeas corpus…in other words “no right to be bought before a judge about whether you should be held or not on whatever charge.” Statute of limitations for all crimes would be put in abeyance. Arrested people could also be detained without hearing for the duration of the emergency. Those people could be deemed ‘pre-arrested,’ a new and very handy designation, and not have any rights at all. These new rules would be fully applicable at all levels, federal, state and even county and local.

That the justice department, all America’s U.S. Justice Department, would even ask for these new powers is stunning in the message it sends to us all, much less the message about congress if it acts to pass these provisions. Here is the first article published about this ‘cell’ of another distant, but not so distant, thunderstorm…

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