> The extent of qualified immunity is a stain on this country...

Agreed, and that is why we fought so hard in CO to over-turn it [0] during the BLM riots, which really should have been called overt police abuse riots akin to those in LA in the 90s during the Rodeny King arrest. Which I saw happen in real-time as a child.

The fact that the rest of the US didn't follow suit was an immense tragedy, as that was likely the ONLY time that this would have been possible due to COVID and the shutdown slowing down the economy enough for people to realize how far we had fallen and get politically active in their community.

Instead it's been a tragic reality come to life rife with more authoritarian encroachment on civil liberties both on and offline. All of this while we see what authoritarian nations like Russia and China do serving as a stark reality of how quickly bad things can get.

See, this is the hard part about living in a Republic: you have to place a great deal of faith in the populace to be just as active and as well informed as oneself for it to sustain itself if it's to remain a Republic wherein the Citizen's rights are upheld and the State is suppressed to it's enumerated and outlined duties.

I personally never wanted to be an activist, it's incredibly difficult and often sad thing to do because of the harsh realities of Life it exposes you and the emotional and mental toll that it takes, but I realized that without it we can lose what so many fought for to get us to this point in order to advance Society and Civilization as a whole--as flawed as the West may be it is still orders of magnitude better than perhaps any of it's predecessors to date in most capacities, and it's worth fighting for.

I fear that that the American experiment placed the most value on this since it's inception, but that much like Rome because of overt corruption and nepotism it's populace became more and more disenfranchised and apathetic as time went on and it devolved into just another imperial plutocracy.

I still think the US is remarkable in many ways, but if it's own populace cannot or will not resist against this than what was thought to be an ongoing experiment in self-governance might have ended in my Lifetime.

> It’s amazing watching American politics talk about how not even the President is above the law but then watch news stories about Qualified Immunity.

That's just a platitude and I don't think that was ever anything but a fabrication to tell children and the feeble minded alike to give the illusion of how skewed the Law really is the closer you get to it's source of power (State): Bush et al are all War Criminals [1]. It's worth noting that this all happened when I was a child and I soon realized what a farce this was then, too. Hence the need to get involved in activism.

> In recent weeks, in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez and others have been formulating defenses against possible prosecutions for war crimes and are pressuring Republican members of Congress to pass new laws to protect them.

>> As long as George Bush is president and controls the Department of Justice, there will no prosecutions for war crimes, but after Bush is gone, anything could happen and hundreds of Americans could be charged with war crimes.

0: https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicksibilla/2020/06/21/colorado...

1: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/is-george-bush-guilty-of_b_26...