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The 1st Amendment protects the right to assembly, but only on paper while police can unilaterally declare protests against them to be illegal and enforce that declaration with violence.
The 2nd Amendment protects the right to firearm ownership and codifies a militia to prevent the presence of a standing army during peacetime, but only on paper while police function as that standing army and use "I thought he had a gun" as a justification for killing.
The 3rd Amendmemt protects the right to not have a standing army forced upon our communities, but only on paper while police and national guard are exempted from the definition of "soldiers" and are stationed on street corners in major cities in full battle-rattle.
The 4th Amendment protects the right to privacy, but only on paper while the government monitors our communications en masse, and police stop-and-frisk people and use pretexts like "odor of marijuana" to conduct searches.
The 5th Amendmemt protects the right to not have property confiscated by the government without due process, but only on paper while police use "Civil Asset Forfeiture" to claim that your possessions are proceeds of a crime, and force you to prove that it's not to get it back.
The 6th Amendment protects the right to have a fair trial before being punished, but only on paper when police make mass arrests and turn the process of arrest and trial into a form of punishment itself.
The 7th Amendment protects the right to have a trial by jury, but only on paper when police and prosecutors massively inflate the charges against the accused, and leverage mandatory minimums to coerce guilty pleas out of innocent people for fear of a de facto life sentence.
The 8th Amendment protects the right to not face cruel punishment or be charged exorbitant bail or fines, but only on paper while people sit in jail for months for lack of bail money, and police face no consequences for extrajudicial punishments against people on the street.
We have these rights on paper, but paper is where they stay so long as we allow the police to act as an occupying army. And both major political parties are complicit.
The people are crying out for freedom, and their "representatives" keep increasing the budget for oppression.
The people are crying out for freedom, and their "representatives" keep increasing the budget for oppression.
