For those of us who grew up in the shadow of WWII, fear was something with which we had a more than passing acquaintance. The first time I felt fear was sitting in our living room in Cliffside Park, NJ on December 7th 1941 and listening to President Roosevelt tell us that we were at war. The words didn’t mean much to me, I was only five years old but I could hear the tone of voice coming from the radio and I could sense the powerful emotions that moved from person to person around the room. I wasn’t aware of what they were, but for the first time in my life I had a sense of fear.
That fear would eventually be deepened as I began to understand what war meant, as the gold stars began to appear in windows in our neighborhood and those of our relatives in Brooklyn. But to offset that fear we learned about those who overcame it, those who displayed bravery and came home heroes.
Fear and bravery have always been part of the individual American experience. I grew up thinking of this as a brave country, a country that always tried to do the right thing and always chose to help others. Sure, there were always people who were not brave, and sometimes those who were extremely brave but who were labeled otherwise, because their bravery was not understood by those around them.
But somehow, we, as a country, have entered into an era where bravery has taken a back seat to security. I don’t mean that there are no more brave individuals. There are. People who do heroic things to help others will always exist, but somehow our collective id has become cowardly, somehow we have decided as a people to put a sense of false security ahead of everything else. I say false security because on a planet overrun with monstrous weapons, controlled by a species that has almost no regard for human life, and in a universe that can release a planet-crushing meteor at any second, there is no hard line security.
What am I talking about here? Well, if you haven’t figured it out yet; it’s our abandonment of our freedoms in exchange for an unproven security network that advertises itself as necessary for the protection of the American people but is really just another way for the military/industrial complex to fleece us of our tax dollars and for the government to more closely monitor our lives.
It seems that Osama bin Laden was far more successful than he could have possibly imagined. Either that or our sense of national self was a lot more vulnerable than we had supposed. We have, for a couple of centuries, imagined ourselves to be invulnerable, and all of a sudden we aren’t. One strike on American soil, some serious casualty numbers and the end of a few rather unfortunate looking buildings and we are suddenly seeing how the rest of the world lives.
Some of us reacted by starting wars that had nothing to do with the tragedy that had befallen us. Many served bravely in those wars. But here at home we cringed at the thought of a recurrence of 911 and we allowed our government to implement rules that robbed us of our freedoms and stripped us of our American rights in the name of safety and security. That’s right, our own government is taking away what we have always fought for; taking it away in the name of saving us from a terror that does exist, but is far less injurious to the American spirit than the measures that are being taken to protect against it.
Look around you. We are inundated by attacks on our privacy and our freedoms. Every government agency and many commercial ones now have the right to know any and everything about us. Our phones are tapped, our computers invaded, our streets under constant video surveillance. This was originally the work of the much-maligned Bush cabal. Dissenters were silenced, people were imprisoned at the infamous Guantanamo; many were tortured there and abroad, all in the name of freedom. And it hasn’t stopped there.
We threw out the gangsters of the Bush/Cheney team and we replaced them with a shiny new team that promised a new deal. Except the new deal is as bad if not worse than the old one.
Even as the abuses continued, our new president allowed the arrest and imprisonment of a whistleblower who is accused of treason and helping the enemy when his actual sin was informing the American public of the horrors that their military were committing in their name. It isn’t the exposure of government secrets that the military and the White House fear but embarrassment over the barbaric deeds committed by some of our misguided kids, and some of their, not fit for command, officers. Our government has yet to prove that even one life was lost due to Bradley Manning’s act of disobedience. What his actions caused was a revelation of the kinds of things that our military was covering up in our name.
The military claims that his actions aided the enemy. That’s a lie, the only enemy that the WikiLeaks material helped was us, in our understanding of how the military was doing or not doing its job. So if Manning was helping the enemy, than, not surprisingly, the military considers the American citizenry as the enemy. This is, of course a condition that has existed for a long time and the main reason why it’s a necessity to have a non-military head of military operations.
The final betrayal of our freedom came when Barak Obama signed the NDAA into law, giving the military the power to arrest and hold without trial or proof, any American citizen on American soil for as long as they want. This is the repudiation of habeas corpus, the bedrock of all American freedom and justice. What the hell was Obama thinking? What the hell were the men who framed this law thinking? In one crippled gesture they have made Osama bin Laden’s life a triumph. In one totalitarian document they have achieved what bin Laden and all his terrorist co-conspirators had failed to achieve.
We no longer live in a free country. We now live in a totalitarian state where your rights and your freedoms can be snatched away on the whim of a Joe McCarthy, a Dick Cheney or a Ted Cruz. Welcome to Stalag America where we have given away our long held and hard fought freedoms for a cowardly sense of false security.
The incredible irony of the situation is; even though we rail against the gun nuts and their sick need to own weapons of war, it may some day be them, that we turn to, in defense of rights that our government will no longer uphold.