Joan Walsh has a nifty little round-up of conservative malpractice as regards the civil rights movement in general, and Dr. King in particular. But there's one passage in it that I find more than a bit troubling.

I had a productive conversation about this recently with Dr. James Peterson, professor of Africana Studies at Lehigh University and a fellow MSNBC analyst, on Martin Bashir's show. He worried aloud that some on the left care more about Snowden's revelations than the ongoing "stop and frisk" controversy and other civil liberties issues, like racial profiling, experienced exclusively by blacks and Latinos. I made the plea that people who care about social justice have to - and many of us do - care about both sets of issues, and he agreed. But the unspoken question was, which should be prioritized, when?

I would argue -- and have -- that there are not two issues here and, therefore, there is no need to "prioritize" one over the other. There is a single issue, and that issue is that we have become an over-policed society. This extends beyond actual law-enforcement, which is where stop-and-frisk and profiling come in, as well as the preposterous militarization of all the aspects of local and state policeforces, from their equipment procurement policiesto their response to things like street demonstrations, which latterseems to be drawn from the Powell Doctrine of overwhelming force. It also includes the de facto police powers present in the corporate workplace, where the company can require you to be searched without your consent. It also very definitely includes what's been going on at the NSA. And last, it includes the attitudes and deference to authority that all of the policed aspects of our society embed in the people themselves, where we see this preposterous escalation as a kind of new normal because TERRORISM! or something. Nobody seriously asks any more why the Bloomingdale (Ga.) PD needs a grenade launcher, and the response to the NSA revelations has been sadly mixed. If you have nothing to hide, well...

That minority citizens get the tip of the sword on this one is undeniable. That's been the case with the law -- and with police work -- since the nation began. (Check the incarceration rates for drug offenses, if you don't believe me.) But we are all now living as suspects in the eyes of too many people with too much power and too much technology and too much motivation to use the last two. We're all suspects now. We're all in this together.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io