…… It turns out that we’re no different from the wine-guzzling,
food-noshing, party-loving Bird Nation. We too are easily fooled by charismatic
politicians bearing gifts. And we too are easily distracted as those same
politicians and their cohorts rob us blind.
Case in point: while Barack Obama winds down his presidency with
a flurry of celebrity-studded events that is causing the media to hail him as
the “coolest” president, and the presidential
candidates continue to distract us with spectacular feats of chest-thumping,
browbeating, and demagoguery, the police state continues its steady march
onward.
All of the revelations of government wrongdoing, spying and corruption disclosed
by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden seem to have fallen on deaf
ears.
Nothing has improved or changed for the better.
There has been no real reform, no significant attempts at
greater transparency, no accountability, no scaling back of the government’s
warrantless, illegal domestic surveillance programs, and no recognition by
Congress or the courts that the Fourth Amendment provides citizens with any
protection against unreasonable searches and seizures by government agents.
In fact, as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People,we’ve been subject to even more obfuscation, even more
lies, even more sleight-of-hand maneuvers by government agencies determined to
keep doing what they’re doing without any restrictions on their nefarious
activities, and even more attempts by government agencies to listen to our
phone calls, read our emails and text messages, monitor our movements, and
generally imprison us within an electronic concentration camp……
(Full text at link below)
In other words, government spying isn’t making us safer, but it
is making us less free. “In the end, we’ve lost part of our freedom that maybe we’ll never get
back. We’ve lost some part of what makes our system great, but in
the end, we’ve not really gained the security we thought we would get in the
tradeoff for the freedom that we’ve given up.”
You can cast your ballot for one of the many slogan-spouting
politicians who are long on lies and short on loyalty to their constituents. At
the end of the day, these people work for the government and their primary
purpose is to remain in office, living the kind of rarefied, pampered,
privileged life that the average American only gets to dream about. Every one
of the members of the Senate Intelligence Committee who voted for this
legislation is a traitor to their oath of office and should be booted off that
committee. What’s more, any member of Congress who votes for this legislation
should be sent packing back to where they came from. As Brewster Kahle, another recipient of an NSL who
successfully challenged the government’s gag order, reminds us, “The government
is not one monolithic thing. It’s a bunch of people, thinking they’re doing their jobs.” It’s our job
to make them toe the line when their thinking goes awry.
Or you can stop drinking the happy juice, stop believing the
politicians’ lies, stop being so gallingly gullible and out to lunch, and start
getting angry. In our politically correct, feel-good, play nice culture, anger
has gotten a bad rap, but there’s something to be said for righteous anger
acted upon in a nonviolent, effective fashion. It’s what Martin Luther King Jr.
referred to as “military nonviolent resistance.” It means caring enough to get
off your caboose, get on your feet and get actively involved in holding
government officials accountable to the simple fact that they work for “we the
people.”
It’s not an easy undertaking.
The government has been playing fast and loose with the rules
for too long now, and its greed for power and riches is boundless.
Still we are not powerless, although the government’s powers
grow daily. We have not yet been altogether muzzled, although the acts of
censorship increase daily. And we have not yet lost all hope for restoring our
republic, although the outlook appears bleaker by the day.
For the moment, we still have some small allotment of freedoms
by which we can express our displeasure, push back against injustice and
corruption, and resist tyranny. One Texas man, outraged at being fined $212 for
driving 39 in a 30 mph zone, chose to pay his fine with 22,000 pennies. It was a
small act of disdain in the face of a government machine that tolerates little
resistance, but it was acts such as these that sowed the early seeds of
resistance that birthed this nation.
As revolutionary patriot, Samuel Adams observed, “It does not
take a majority to prevail… but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on
setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men.”
