The rule of law matters
The riots and protests in Los Angeles and elsewhere are a consequence of the disintegrating rule of law, along with the outright cruelty in how orders to detain are executed. Citizens are being arrested if they fit the profile. A woman here on holiday was forcibly removed from her daughter who was left unaccompaniedied on the street while she’s screaming the kind of soul-shattering scream a woman gives off when she knows her life is in danger. Plain-clothes unidentified grown men are walking into elementary schools trying to access children as young as six without consent of guardians. Some of the “agents” are clearly not trained government employees but part of the kind of free-standing border militias gleefully cracking windows with pregnant screaming mothers inside them.
Recently, an Afghan national who served with US troops in Afghanistan and secured asylum status was picked up by ICE and separated from his children. He is one of many asylum seekers who followed the rules, only to now realize the game was never saw him as human. In fact, given all the people being picked up by ICE at their immigration appointments, it’s clear the rules mean nothing.
I don’t care what your stance is on illegal immigrants. If they should have come here legally, if they should be removed — that’s fine, keep your opinion. But we need to be able to hold eye to eye here on the common ground, which is this: THE RULE OF LAW MATTERS.
At the start of our country’s acceleration toward extremism in the last decade, one of the most eye-opening conversations I had was with a doctoral candidate who studied vigilante groups in Nigeria. The sum of that conversation is this: a breakdown in the rule of law births VIGILANTES under which there is no consensus reality.
A cohesive society can only exist with a shared rule of law. The rule of law in the United States has been publicly disintegrating since 2017. No shared code equals no order other than "lethal order," as I wrote about in my Substack late last year. [See “A Most Lethal Order”]
In working in counter-Islamism/extremism, America's flippant attitude toward inequity in law was a major driver for terror recruitment. But it's not just about law...it's about what law represents, which is a cohesive shared reality. As we're seeing in full swing now, the fact that anything can change at any time and it's magically considered legal because it's convenient for the crook in power, reinforced the idea of faith-based ideological supremacy.
But it's not just about religion; it's also about culture. Old cultures. Ancient cultures that span time and tide. Cultures older than the speck in time that the idea of America has been in play. And for all their faults and shortcomings in which communities and people were othered as primitive or regressive, there was a code of honor that offered continuity and cohesion. Yet, what honor can be expected among thieves, as the saying goes.
The question is then, where is the thievery? What exactly is being stolen from us? Because something is absolutely being stolen, and it isn't just freedom. It's our shared reality.
As I predicted in 2020, extremism is our new reality for years to come.
Protest photo credit: source unknown
