Category: Law, Constitution, and Jurisprudence

Dear FBI:
—“It’s not that we’re hiding anything, it’s that you can’t seem to comprehend what we’re not hiding.”–

Everything we do is public. Everything we do is constitutionally legal. Everything we do is moral. We’re pretty open with military and law enforcement. We recruit from military and law enforcement. And we never hear from them as other than with positive feedback.

Though it’s the FBI that gets sent out every time one of us posts something that can be misinterpreted on social media. And it’s a silly conversation every time.

The problem? LEO seeking to prosecute vs seeking to understand. Today an agent kept calling me evasive for my answers to the question of whether I was OK with violence. Of course, he doesn’t know that I think this is a dumb question coming from law enforcement that uses violence for moral purposes. Violence like energy is a resource – it’s neutral. Its whether that resource is put to good or ill use. And, worse, whether one grasps what is good or ill in the context.

In the context of reformation, it’s the risk of violence for failure to redress moral grievances that causes governments to reform. The civil rights groups achieved their goals in under six weeks. They were moral goals (for the most part.)

So it’s not the violence, is the risk of violence that’s necessary to bring a reluctant party to the table. But it’s that possibility of violence that produces the solution to the problems that eliminate the want of violence. In other words, asking me whether I advocated violence was dishonest, entrapment, and an attempt to force me to say something out of a context that as moral, into one that was not. That’s deception.

So, seriously, when you come to talk to me, or us, bring someone from Justice with a knowledge of constitutional law and history. Otherwise we literally can’t talk to one another cogently. Watching expressionless incomprehension followed by eyes glazing over, followed by questions or accusations that are not only entrapment, but absurd or intellectually insulting isn’t helpful.

I understand. Y’all approach matters without much depth. Perhaps that’s your job. But we aren’t like that. We follow the strategy of the founders: demand for a redress of grievances by proposal of moral solutions to those grievances, and the confession of guilt and illegitimacy by failure to address them.

And while it will take time – it will work.

So in the meantime, please help us respect one another in our job to try to prevent escalation into civil war.

Because the difference between us is that we can stop a civil war with our tools.

You can’t but encourage it with yours.

Affections.
CD