Oh, we don't see the militarized police wandering around the streets in full body armor with their tanks and assault weapons and wearing full body armor most of the time, but when we choose to exercise our first amendment rights to peaceably assemble, this is what happens all too often:

This woman, Ieshia Evans, who apparently posed such a threat to the Baton Rouge Police force by standing in the street that they appeared in overwhelming force to arrest her and her fellow demonstrators for the Black Live Matters Movement, is a nurse from Pennsylvania. When she learned of the murder of Alton Sterling by police, she drove all the way to Baton Rouge, LA, "because she wanted to look her son in the eyes to tell him she fought for his freedom and rights,” according to R. Alex Haynes, who said on Facebook he has known Evans since childhood."

The crime for which she was arrested and which required three heavily armed and armored police officers with guns at the ready to shoot her down, had she made the slightest wrong move, was a misdemeanor: blocking traffic. She was one of roughly 180 protestors arrested by the Baton Rouge police. And they were far from the only city to display an extreme show of force when people in other cities held similar protests.

My own city of Rochester, NY, which has an African American woman mayor, and a large African American community, also chose to arrest 74 peaceful BLM demonstrators on , hours after the protest began, two of them African American reporters. They did so, not because they feared the marchers were about to commit acts of violence, but as a demonstration, pure and simple of their willingness to use excessive and brutal force to suppress dissent.

Welp, that was interesting. Cuffed by RPD while cover protest in downtown ROC. Was never told I wasn't supposed to be on sidewalk - — Carlet Cleare (@ccleare) July 9, 2016

One hundred and twelve (112) law enforcement officers, from the RPD and "state police and members of town police departments" (including SWAT teams) were out in a show of force, to protect the citizens from - what exactly?

No officers were injured and there was no property damage. [...] "The SWAT team and police came and everybody took a seat on the ground because we didn't want any of our movements to be misinterpreted as violence or trying to get aggressive or resisting arrest," said Ashley Gantt, one of the protest's organizers, "There shouldn't have been any arrests because there wasn't anything wrong," said Aiesha Coleman of Rochester, who was part of the protest from the start. "We were peacefully protesting and sitting when (the officers) came ... We sat and stood our ground. They just started snatching people who refused to move to the side." [...] Groups of officers collapsed into various pockets and made arrests multiples times. Two women were brought to the ground and handcuffed. One of the women screamed at officers as they pushed her against a squad car. Ashley Gantt tried to calm those being detained. Gantt spoke to the women with a megaphone, instructing the detainees not to resist. "Don't say nothing," Gantt instructed the women. "Sweetheart, you've got to calm down. We've been out here all day. Don't resist."

If you believe that such arrests were necessary as a matter of public safety to protect us from "terrorist thugs" threatening imminent danger to our society, in Rochester, in Baton Rouge, and other cities, you are sadly mistaken. The police in each case forced these confrontations.

The police were the ones using violent force to subdue peaceful demonstrators. These arrests occurred because the police, with their massive, militarized shows of force, acted in each instance to inflame the situation, and trample on the first amendment rights of the demonstrators. They were there, with their guns and batons and tasers and other "riot gear" (though no riots were occurring) solely to send a message: no dissent in America is allowed. No peaceable assembly of the people to exercise their first amendment rights will be permitted if the message of those who choose to exercise their rights is not one that our elected officials - local, state and federal - find acceptable.

And if you think this "oppression" is limited to "those people" and not to you, the law abiding white person, you forget what happened during the Occupy Movement protests, when anyone, whether a participant or merely an innocent bystander, was liable to be assaulted viciously by the police in attendance. All for one purpose: to deny us the rights the Constitution guarantees in the Bill of Rights. It didn't matter that the people involved in Occupy were non-violent and posed little threat to anyone. It didn't matter that they included among their number, veterans of our Middle eastern wars, who supposedly fought for "our freedoms" "over there," only to return home and discover what little freedom an ordinary citizen of the United States of America is truly permitted to have.

Now, if you are a member of the elite political and economic classes, you have all the freedom for which anyone could ask. You can commit crimes, and not be indicted. You can be responsible for the torture, wrongful imprisonment and deaths of millions and no one will charge you with any crimes against humanity. You will bask in the glow of the many rewards your exalted status brings. For you have the freedom to do almost anything - launder billions of dollars of drug cartel money, for example - and never fear you will be called to account for your crimes, even though you aided and abetted some of the worst and most violent criminals on the planet. Must be a nice life.

For the rest of us, if we choose, as so many are doing, to put our bodies and lives at risk by going to Philadelphia and Cleveland to register our opposition to the the policies and corruption rampant among elected officials who belong to said parties, neither of which represents the interests of anyone other than their wealthy individual and corporate donors, any talk of our freedoms, or of our inalienable right to dissent and present our grievances to the government, without risking potentially severe and bloody consequences at the hands of "law enforcement," is laughable.

For we are a nation under occupation. We are fed propaganda on a daily basis that offers us the illusion of freedom, liberty and justice for all. But the hard reality is that we lost those liberties, those rights, and our democracy long ago. And to win them back will be the most arduous task in our nation's history. But what other choice do we have if we are unwilling to turn our eyes away from the tyrants and oligarchs who treat as both labor to be exploited and commodities from which to to earn profits?

We can close our eyes, we can deny reality, we can numb ourselves with drugs, alcohol and indulge in the only right that seems to matter, the "right" to buy and carry around guns and endanger our fellow Americans, or we can fight back against a tyranny that lurks in the shadows, that evades exposure and is never held accountable.

The last option, difficult as it may seem, hopeless at times as it may appear to em, is the one I choose. Like Ieshia Evans, I don't want it said about me that I didn't fight for my children's freedom and rights, either.