According to the FreePress, a neighborhood near the airport might as well be in the South Bronx as in South Burlington.
Having already suffered the indignity of being judged expendable in the name of progress and security, the fragmented community has also now been targeted for urban assault games.
Few details seem to be available as to which law enforcement bodies are involved or who called open-season on the devastated neighborhood, other than that permission for the use appears to have been granted by Airport management. Maybe gunfire and explosions are expected to condition local ears to receive the roar of F-35’s without a whimper.
South Burlington Police Chief Trevor Whipple says it wasn’t his force disturbing the peace.
He said the South Burlington police haven’t used the empty houses for training and added he is unclear which agencies have.
Beyond the obvious insensitivity, it seems astonishingly unprofessional and dangerous to conduct such exercises without a great deal of prior public notice and some opportunity for public comment.
We all recognize the need for police services, just as we accept the need for some amount of military capability; but lately in the Green Mountain State, the line between the two is beginning to blur as communities get themselves equipped with tanks, and Tasers become the accepted means to control drunks and unruly kids.
I don’t really understand this push.
On the one-hand you have the argument that the state’s population is aging out; that there aren’t many young people left and we need to grow the economy to attract them back again. On the other, is the fact that the larger the population in our towns and cities, the more policing services and equipment we seem to need; and the greater the opportunity for criminal enterprise to find a toe-hold as well.
We already have an inordinately large prison population; so large in fact, that we have to export it. It’s a well-known fact that that burgeoning prison population is largely the result of unrealistic drug laws and a broken approach to mental health and addiction at the state and national level.
How can we be so anxious to “grow” our towns and cities without first fixing those population-related vulnerabilities?
It seems that the popular wisdom holds that we should invite Walmart and other cheap employers to invade local economies, expand our vulnerable populations, and, at the same time, attract the parasitic criminals who feed on their poverty and our enabling drug laws.
This, in turn, forces an expansion of police presence and provides a golden opportunity for armaments makers to expand beyond the profits they have enjoyed during our interminable modern wars.
Is it any surprise that people…neighbors, actually…have come to be largely beside the point when our growing need for security must be satisfied at any cost?
