A sobering voice of civility is exactly what everyone needs to hear right now. Getting pissed off about things solves absolutely nothing. That's what everyone is doing right now in Ferguson. Getting really fucking pissed off at one another.
Anyone feeling the same is as guilty as they are. They just don't happen to be in possession of an armored vehicle and riot gear. If they did they'd probably be out somewhere knocking heads together.
Someone needs to convince the people who elect these Sheriffs that they should put someone in charge who isn't going to buy 50,000 rounds of tear gas.
You know what's really going to end our democracy? Everyone abandoning it because they think it is too hard to go out, interact with people, and maybe start a real dialog about how we're governing ourselves.
Getting angry, pointing fingers, and inventing some sort of "us vs. them" mentality does nothing to prevent things like this from happening.
Tyranny is "super-extreme". We're nowhere near it. Implying that we are is irresponsible and most importantly, is a type of language that is hard to reconcile. The goal is conflict resolution. That doesn't mean that the actions are condoned just that there are plenty of ways to respond to situations like this.
We quite clearly have a lot of remaining issues from our past. Slavery, segregation, civil wars... it's been a fucking shit show. But so has basically everywhere else.
I'd say that events in Ferguson are more a reflection of our traumatic past than evidence of some sort of paranoid future of oppression. The oppression is behind us, fading away. Fear and mutual misunderstanding is what will lead us back to that bullshit.