> And people don't riot. That's new. That's worse.

Coming from a part of the world that has seen at least one revolution and several coups d'etat in the last century, this is one of the things that has made me particularly troubled about how much Americans value their democracy and about how much they value their comfort. Back there, when the Iron Curtain fell, they needed about ten years of deportations and forced imprisonments to get things under reasonable control, and it only lasted for thirty years afterwards. That's in a country where people could literally be thrown in jail because they knew someone, couldn't possess fire weapons and couldn't assembly in public places, making any riot almost impossible to start, let alone work. Countries with one tenth of the US population mobilize more people in a teachers' strike than the Occupy movement -- with arguably more widespread concerns -- mobilized.

When the government's abuse takes the form of unfair judges and militarized police force, you can't break down the abuse by whining in the press and debating on the TV. That's the circus they hand out when the grain isn't cutting it anymore. I'm yet to see even the most modest form of civil disobedience in a sizeable quantity. A bunch of people gathering up and not paying taxes or something. FFS -- a students' strike. When I was a kid, there was a point when students grew so unhappy that they simply called a strike and refused to go to class -- nationwide. A lot of professors tried to bully them into it, many of them ended up having to take a lot of exams again, but conditions did actually improve to some degree -- and they also didn't do anything that was remotely in danger of being labeled as some form of disobedience worthy of imprisonment. Basically, everyone decided to skip the classes with the same reason.

There's also the sense of community -- or, rather, the sense of division against the government. Everyone there seems to be friends with each other, but the sense of injustice is enjoyed by everyone in private, and only shared over a couple of beers.

About twenty years ago, a team from the local equivalent of the DEA missed the apartment and smashed open the door of one of our neighbors. His wife was pregnant and both of them were terrified, but when one of the policemen tried to drag her on the floor (protocol asks for it -- but they also didn't show any ID when they smashed the door open) the dude snapped and punched one of them. Needless to say, a lot of rabble ensued and the whole block woke up. Our apartment was next door to theirs, so the first one to jump out was my father (to make matters worse, he was a Colonel).

When everyone there realized what had happened, the policemen barely got out alive. One of them got out with a dislocated jaw, another one with a broken nose, and it was literally only the timely intervention of their colleagues that prevented them from being lynched.

Three of them were eventually discharged and one of them was moved to another city. I have no doubt that, under normal circumstances, nothing would have happened; the abnormal circumstance here was that my dad was the one who threw in the first punch. Pressing charges against someone from an institution who also had enough influence over judges was simply unproductive: it wasn't as much a problem of not fucking triple-checking what door you're smashing down as a problem of messing with someone who had the biggest bureaucratic cock.

This was as dystopian as it could be. There was no impartial justice to speak of and the government had no formal policy to protect its citizens from abuse, and the reach of the government's power/control was modest to say the least. However, some safety was provided by the sense of community: when everyone could jerk the system to their own interest, some of them occasionally chose to jerk it towards the interest of their families or friends.