Beggaring imagination

Politicians seem to feel no shame or guilt regarding the fact that their "legislation" has resulted in millions of non-violent people being forcibly taken from their friends and families and made to live in cages for years on end -- sometimes for the rest of their lives. When politicians speak of the acts of violence for which they are directly responsible -- and "drug" laws are only one example -- they use terms such as "the law of the land," as if they themselves are mere spectators and "the land" or "the country" or "the people" were the ones who made such violence occur.

Indeed, the politicians' level of psychological detachment from what they have personally and directly caused via their "laws" borders on insanity. They command armies of "tax collectors" to forcibly confiscate the wealth earned by hundreds of millions of people. They enact one intrusive law after another using threats of violence to control every aspect of the lives of millions of people they have never met and know nothing about. And after they have been directly responsible for initiating violence on a regular basis against nearly everyone within hundreds if not thousands of miles of them, they are genuinely shocked and offended if one of their victims threatens to use violence against them.

When young men and women are dying and being disfigured in the tens of thousands yearly in the latest war game staged by politicians, the politicians call it a "sacrifice for freedom" when it is nothing of the sort. They use scenes of soldiers in caskets -- directly attributable to what they did -- as photo opps while declaring their deep sadness. They often launch into a speech about what happened as if they were mere observers, caught up in events bigger than they, just like the rest of us.

From The Most Dangerous Superstition