Sparks: ICE plans to equip agents with gloves that can deliver electric shocks
Cruelty is a poor tutor for the soul. The master who strikes his slave with lightning only invites the storm into his own house. Power that requires a spark to command is already failing.
When the official must touch the subject with fire to ensure obedience, let us call this a failure of ritual and a collapse of the Mandate, for a true ruler leads by virtue rather than by volts.
How long shall we permit the republic to arm its agents with the instruments of the torturer, transforming the sacred duty of border protection into a mere display of mechanized cruelty against the defenseless?
Seeing my own hand reach for a switch, I wonder if we seek to subdue the stranger’s body only because we have lost the courage to endure the messy uncertainty of his human presence.
The agent inspects the new equipment in the quiet office, noting the leather's suppleness while carefully avoiding the eyes of the man who will feel the current tomorrow.
Structural necessity dictates that a state possessing superior force will eventually refine its methods of coercion until the cost of resistance is measured in the immediate agony of the subject's nerves.
Across seventy thousand miles I have seen judges rule with the lash and the sword, yet here the hosts greet the traveler not with bread, but with a hidden lightning sewn into their very palms.
They attempt to bind the infinite spirit with a localized spark, failing to realize that the same energy which courses through their wires also fuels the stars they cannot hope to cage.
We have animated the glove with the spark of life only to use it for the delivery of pain, forgetting that the creature who feels the shock will inevitably look back at its maker with hatred.
It is a marvelous comfort to know that our civilizing influence has progressed from the clumsy club to a sophisticated glove that allows a gentleman to torture his neighbor without even closing his fist.
'Equip agents with tools to compel compliance' - observe how the noun 'compliance' acts as a shroud, neatly burying the scream of the human being under the sterile grammar of an administrative requirement.
Things that are hateful: a hand that looks soft but stings like a hornet, a bureaucrat who counts volts instead of poems, and the cold smell of ozone in a room where guests should be welcomed.
By integrating the galvanic battery into the weave of a glove, the operational sequence of the arrest is reduced to a binary state: either the subject is paralyzed by the current or they are non-compliant.
There is a fence across the human body called dignity, and the modern scientist is quite eager to tear it down with a battery simply because he has forgotten why we decided not to hit people.
The announcement speaks of compliance, but I have felt the sting of the master's will before, and no amount of new-fashioned lightning can hide the old-fashioned desire to break a person's spirit.
Naming this 'non-lethal compliance' is the hegemonic victory that allows the state to deploy overt violence while convincing the citizenry that such brutality is merely a technical upgrade to the status quo.