Checkpoint Nation

Does anyone else remember back in the day, when we heard the word “checkpoint” we thought of Germany? First it was Nazi Germany with the “Your papers, please” checkpoints. Then we heard about Berlin’s “Checkpoint Charlie”, the crossing point between the free world and the Communist Bloc behind the Iron Curtain.

That was then. Now we live in a nation that’s becoming more like the old oppressive Eastern European states. We are now are a nation of checkpoints. We now have sobriety checkpoints. We now have drug checkpoints. We now have immigration checkpoints.

How much longer until we have Nazi style “Papers, please” checkpoints? Maybe we’re already there. Americans have been conditioned and frightened into accepting things that would have been dismissed as extreme only a decade ago.

Soon enough, we shall likely see corporate checkpoints with Blackwater thugs frisking citizens and shaking them down. Don’t be surprised.

Now we see old Willie Nelson was arrested for possession of a politically incorrect plant at a checkpoint. I hope you all feel safer.

It’s too bad this had to happen. The drug war is as insane and counterproductive as most other wars. It is institutionalized cruelty to harmless users and fills the pockets of criminal cartels. We can do better, but this is a corporatocracy where private prisons, mandatory “treatment” centers, courts, cops, and a vast horde of rogues profit from injustice.

At least the people are wising up. They are voting through ballot initiatives, perhaps our last vestige of democracy, to allow the humane use of medicinal cannabis. Politicians are the cowards responsible for the continuation of the cruel and unjust drug war. Not that they care about blood on their hands, or the lives of harmless people destroyed by prison and legal persecution.

As with the war on terror, the only way to win the war on drugs is to end it.

For now, all I can say is, “Roll down the windows, Willie.”