The Night They Came for Arlo Booth.

It's a quiet night in a suburb just outside Omaha, Nebraska. A giant orange harvest moon lies heavy and low in an unusually warm autumn night as Arlo Booth walks the kitchen trash out to the curb. He's a father of three and works as an independent data analysist in the city. Wendy, his wife and he have been married for twelve years.

He pauses for just a moment and peers up at the sky and thinks to himself what an amazing life he has. Born and farmed raised on the broad expanses of the Nebraska prairie, he graduated from a class of 27 and went to college at the University of Missouri where he majored in Statistics and Mathematics. From rather meager beginnings he built a reputation in the technology field as a no nonsense, hardworking expert on everything technical. After a brief reflection, he closes the lid on the trash can, worried only of the neighborhood raccoons and heads back in the house, entirely unaware of the eyes on him.

A block away in a Ford Eco-Line van labeled on the side: "Action Electric", sit half a dozen employees of the Department of Justice. They are battle-hardened soldiers recently back from Afghanistan where they have accumilated extensive experience in the art of search, seizure, and detainment of enemy combatants. A decade of war has hardened their emotions and whittled their senses to a point. They are exactly what the Department of Homeland Security and Department of Justice had in mind, and tonight they have their sights squarely on Arlo Booth.

In the van, the group commander is given the go, via satellite phone, from Washington DC, and the arrest is a green light. The van speeds ahead to the driveway of Booth's home and the six figures in black ski masks lunge from the van doors, taking evasive positions around the home. Information gathered through recent surveillance has indicated that the family's two dogs are alert to strange movements and sounds so they are lured through the doggy door at the rear of the house. As soon as the dogs are out, their throats are slashed and they are drug from the yard. Booth's wife is in a hallway off the kitchen when the group breeches the home and she is quickly subdued with the butt end of a rifle. The children are sleeping as the militants enter the master bedroom bathroom. There they find a startled Mr. Booth preparing for bed. He is thrown to the ground, and hog tied with thick black zip-ties as a black hood is wrapped around his head and secured. He is drug off through the house and out the back door to the van. The van races off into the night. The entire operation takes little more than 90 seconds.

Arlo Booth has just been arrested as a potential enemy combatant and threat to the ruling authority of Office of President of the United States. He is given no legal counsel, no one is told of his where abouts, he simply vanishes from the face the Earth.

But this is America, how could such a thing happen, and why?

Six months earlier, under cover of darkness, while the country was dizzy from New Year celebratory spirits, and the news media was covering holiday shopping trends, the commander in chief was signing into existence a law that would fundamentally change the United States of America forever. The bill had been forged onto parchment with a hurried nervousness by a government who felt the ever looming danger of an enemy like none they had ever faced in the past.

This enemy is well informed.

It can organize through and across the internet in a matter of minutes.

It is educated, indomitable, and has been backed into a corner by ever increasing taxes, tolls, fees, and licensing.

The government, side by side with their financial backers in multi-national corporations, mega-banks, and ruling class families had been caught somewhat off guard when the approval ratings of their boy in the Oval Office fell to a level never seen by a sitting President. That coupled with the even more dismal numbers of their ‘bought and paid for’ members of Congress, warranted action.

This new bill, the NDAA, which stands for the National Defense Authorization Act, authorizes the President to order the

“detention of persons the government suspects of involvement in terrorism, or has generated controversy, or potential implications for abuse of Presidential authority”.

In tradition with tyrants of the past and dictators who’ve leveled entire contrasting opposition, this new, modern Office of the President must ensure the agenda of its financiers, the faceless, nameless specters that slither in smoke-filled back rooms and shadowy corridors slightly out of sight from the populous, but never the less, direct the face of spurious freedom and admiration that is our President.

What did Arlo Booth do to warrant such action? Perhaps it was because he recently began home-schooling his children. Maybe it was because he was growing a winter beard, a dumb contest with his brother, but it was a little too shaggy and un-Christian like. He had recently joined the Sierra club after being polite to a street corner activist in Boulder, Colorado the month before last, maybe that shot up a red flag? Whatever, the reason, the government needs little to label a citizen a terrorist. And, here in this new America, one need not need be labeled a terrorist anyhow, they simply need to be opposed to the agenda of the sitting administration.

The night is near, when they too, may come for you.