The Final Defense of Sanity

According to the basic guidelines of civility, the proper response to impertinent questions and suggestions is to laugh.
For quite some time, innocence has been no defense in the US. On the one hand, there are enough intentionally confusing and contradictory laws you can always be found guilty of something when an investigator pokes long enough into your life. On the other hand, police are increasingly getting away with made-up charges not on any law books anywhere in the country. You can literally be charged for not properly reading the investigating/arresting officers’ mind.
That’s not counting the persecution and harassment for rather serious crimes you’d never commit, but for which someone has simply decided you are guilty and deserve it. Try to imagine how easy it is for someone who sounds and acts like a movie hero FBI agent to describe a non-existent, but plausible dossier on your past sins. Imagine how associates, coworkers, neighbors, even family members can be made to believe stuff you’d never do.
But sometimes the easiest path is simply manipulating you into saying or doing something stupid. To this end, a very large number of law enforcement thugs have been trained in getting people bent out of shape. I know this because I’ve sat through the training, and you can be sure it has improved markedly since the early 1990s. It’s easy to push most people’s buttons because they wear them in plain sight.
The defense comes in two steps, two levels.
One: Expect it. That is, don’t be surprised if something like this happens. You tread a fine line between mistaking a run of bad luck for intentional harassment, so you first have to learn to expect bad fortune, and deal with it. There’s this thing called “legitimate human suffering.” But dealing with it is pretty much the same whether it’s your turn for random acts of human meanness and bad timing, or someone is out to get you — keep your cool. Yes, it helps if you can uncover a genuine plot, but in very real terms, it won’t matter that much. If they want you, they’ll get you. The one thing you can do is not let it warp your grip on reality. The world is crappy and we are all going to taste a lot more crap as the cycle of history brings around a collapse in one civilization as another rises.
Two: Stop caring. Specifically, reassess all the things you consider important, perhaps on a regular basis. Will it really be the end of your sanity if you are falsely arrested? Adjust your expectations, yes, but also adjust your sense of what matters. Most of the world around you is desperately dependent on certain conditions for peace and happiness. Don’t be one of those people. When you can reduce your life necessities down to those things by which you remain uniquely yourself, set as your real priorities those things essential to your very character as a human being, then it’s a whole lot easier to let most of that crap go.
Some of us may well face a very real threat to our integrity from the diabolical tools governments have been developing over the past few decades. There are already patented devices which can make you hear voices, see things not there, experience false sensations, and you won’t have any idea because they don’t require the physical proximity you might expect. There are drugs which, even in tiny doses, can totally disassociate what little coherence we might hold between various sections of our brains. Would it surprise you to know every hospital has government and private thugs working there, ready and willing to torture you by creatively altering standard medical treatments? I personally know many church pastors and chaplains who are part of “the program.” You aren’t paranoid enough.
Short of such extraordinary measures, you can deny TPTB the pleasure of breaking you down by simply not giving a crap for what matters to them. Most of the time it’s just too easy to give them what they think they have to have, and not sense any particular compromise in your personal integrity. It’s sort of an extension of “pearls before swine.”
Pigs are among the more intelligent animals, but they are still animals. They can sniff out truffles or anything else you can imagine. You can teach them to get food and physical pleasures as a reward for all sorts of extravagant behavior patterns, but you can’t teach them the difference between pearls and plastic beads. They really don’t care if the sky is blue, much less why. Some people find the truth threatening. You find yourself in the difficult place of trying to figure out what they really have to have to function and try to deliver that. Sometimes you might be the pig who can’t tell pearls, so you don’t worry about questions of absolute truth too much. Figure out what you really have to have and do, and focus on that. Be ready to adjust your assessment from time to time as you experience new assaults on your sanity.
Most of the time, just keep your thoughts to yourself and laugh behind their backs, because you can’t fix stupid.