You know, I get tired of people referring to America as "the land of the free and the home of the brave". It is anything but.
Consider the latest Katrina screwup: Merlene Maten, a church deaconess with a life-long record of community service and an award for her decades of service at a hospital, fled Katrina's floodwaters. She thought the worst was behind her.
Until she was thrown in jail by the local police.
Merlene Maten stands out in the prison where she has been held since Hurricane Katrina. The church deaconess now sleeps among hardened criminals. Her bail is $50,000.
Police say the grandmother from New Orleans took $63.50 in goods from a looted deli the day after Katrina struck. Family and eyewitnesses say Maten is an innocent woman who had gone to her car to get some sausage to eat but was wrongly handcuffed by tired, frustrated officers who couldn't catch younger looters at a nearby store.
Not even the deli owner wants her charged.
Let me see if I have this straight. While women are being raped and people are drowning, the New Orleans police jails an old lady for cooking a sausage that she brought from her home.
Does that about sum it up?
Despite intervention from the nation's largest senior lobby, volunteer lawyers from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and even a private attorney, the family fought a futile battle for 16 days to get her freed. Maten's diabetes, her age, not even her lifelong record of community service could get the system moving.
And is $50,000 a normal bail amount for someone who steals a sausage -- even if she had done it? Uh... nope:
...the original judge who set $50,000 bail by phone -- 100 times the maximum $500 fine under state law for minor thefts -- hadn't returned a week's worth of calls.
I guess he's real busy with other important matters. Maybe he's working on his golf game.
Becnel, family members and witnesses said police snared Maten in the parking lot of a hotel where she had fled the floodwaters that swamped her New Orleans home. She had paid for her room with a credit card and dutifully followed authorities' instructions to pack extra food, they said.
She was retrieving a piece of sausage from the cooler in her car and planned to grill it so she and her frail 80-year-old husband, Alfred, could eat, according to her defenders. The parking lot was almost a block from the looted store, they said.
"That woman was never, never in that store," said Naisha Williams, 23, a New Orleans bank security guard who said she witnessed the episode and is distantly related to Maten. "If they want to take it to court, I'm willing to get on the stand and tell them the police is wrong. She is totally innocent."
Williams, one of the witnesses, said Maten was physically unable to get inside the store -- even if she had wanted to.
"She is not capable of even looting it the way the store was at the time. You had to jump over a counter, and she is a diabetic and weak-muscled and wouldn't be able to get herself over it. And she couldn't afford to step on broken glass," Williams said.
Williams said she tried to explain that to police but was brushed off. "They didn't want to hear it. They put handcuffs on her. They just said we were emotional. It was basically, 'Just shut up,'" she said.
Maten's husband was left abandoned at the hotel, until family members picked him up. He is too upset to be interviewed, the family said.
Have you ever thought about all the brainwashing that American citizens get from birth? That America is the greatest and freest country in the world. That the police are your friends. That everyone else wishes they could be like the United States.
Ask yourself: Is all of that really true?
Consider these points from this great article:
...it's hard to determine qualitatively which is the least free country on earth. So I decided to see if there is a quantitative way to measure it. I found two. First, the country with the most laws would be a candidate for that which is least free. Laws regulate people, so the country which is the least free would surely regulate its people the most. Second, the country with the greatest percentage of its population in jail would also be a candidate for the least free, for obvious reasons. And, if, by chance, some country not only had the most laws but also had the largest percentage of its own population behind bars, we'd at least have a candidate for the least free country on the planet.
So which country has the most laws regulating its citizenry? After looking high and low I discovered that the country with the most laws, not just today, but in all of history is...geez Louise, it's the United States. We not only have the most laws in all of history, but we also turn out more new laws and regulations to manage our people every single year than most countries turn out in decades.
Which country imprisons the highest percentage of its own citizens? Let's see, Russia's up there. And so is the Union of South Africa. And there are some little potentates as we see in Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan. Hmm, but who leads the list. On, no! Folks, you're not going to like this. It's...it's...the United States, again, heading the list of least free countries.
Merlene Maten was finally released Friday morning.
Read the Martian Anthropologist.