I've been reading and watching stories about police and government abuses during the Wuhan Virus outbreak. There are clearly more than a few government functionaries who are enjoying this. This ranges from telling new parents that the infant car seat they need to buy isn't "essential" to police ticketing Christians for going to church on Easter Sunday to police kicking in doors to check for "illegal gatherings". In California, police have sent patrol boats after paddleboarders for not "social distancing".
...100 yards offshore.
The first of those "thoughts I don't like having" is the thought that there's going to be a reckoning for these abuses. And by that, I don't mean people losing their civil service jobs or elective offices. I mean something nastier. There are people who aren't going to forget this and let bygones be bygones. They're going to want some payback. And can you blame them? They're being treated like subjects instead of citizens.
The scarier thought, however, is the thought that there needs to be a nastier reckoning.
As in the earlier case, there are people who aren't going to forget this. But in this case, those people with the long memories are the abusers who will think that they got away with something. The scary thought is that they need to learn a very unpleasant lesson; or more accurately, that they need to become an object lesson for future generations of government officials.
Frederick Douglass stated "A man's rights rest in three boxes. The ballot box, jury box and the cartridge box". The former two are the normal state of affairs in a representative democracy. The latter box is only opened in extremis, but it has been opened in the past.
This nation was founded after the People's government turned on them and began treating them as subjects rather than as citizens. It took violence to end those abuses. The tyrant refused to have it any other way. He took away the ballot and jury boxes and left the People with one option only.
Let's hope that this episode can end differently. Let's hope that a few lost elections, a few criminal prosecutions, and a few lost pensions are enough of a reckoning to teach aspiring tyrants a lesson.
Let's hope that tree isn't getting a little dry.