I was shocked seeing half a dozen fully-outfitted SWAT team members pointing automatic weapons and moving on a local home in the Recorder. There’d been a break-in with an alertly responding occupant quickly escaping; stating they’d seen a weapon. That lengthy vigil ended with tear gas and the suspect in custody.

Given the state of our democracy, I thought how shockingly quick it’s becoming “normal” to see daily news items of armed, masked, militia-style law enforcement deployments in Massachusetts. But maybe that’s the point of Trump’s nationalist tyranny. Damn the Constitution, make the civil landscape appear foreboding, like big-brother surveillance dictatorships in other failed societies across the globe. Gaslighting a people to think terrorists crouch behind every tree and dumpster makes it easy to start suppressing and ignoring age-old constitutional tenets: rule of law, rights of free speech, assembly, due process, habeas corpus, search and seizure.

These often-warrantless, tech-and-blast-centered maneuvers via masked, helmeted and droned operatives moving in on hapless persons presenting neither threat nor challenge to authority, ultimately becomes a kind of psychological assault on democracy, a grim miasma of prior restraint. It’s time to hold our Supreme Court accountable to “the People of the United States.”

Karl Meyer

Greenfield