John Adams, Thoughts on Government, 1776
The Bush Administration, and those who support it, have argued that violating both the law and the Constitution by spying on Americans is necessary, because without such actions, we'd all be in danger. If that refrain sounds familiar, it should - nearly every speech anyone in the Bush administration has made since September 11, 2001 has centered around the same topic - fear. We were attacked, horrifically and tragically, and every one of us knows how that morning affected our lives. And the President isn't about to let us forget it, not even for a moment. Not in the sense of "let's all band together to help each other and stay safe" that permeated the country in the days following the attacks, but as "if you dare question that I know what I'm doing, thousands of people, including more than likely everyone you care about, will die. Die, I tell you. Horrifically."
And by and large, our country bought into it. Our politicians sure did, passing the PATRIOT Act with barely any objection, and then the Senate let fear turn them into a rubber-stamp for War, and then the Democrats were too scared to have an opinion that they conceded two elections. We once had a president who said "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." We now have a president who talks about boogeymen around every corner, so that we're supposed to be afraid all the time.
Our Declaration of Independence states that life is an inalienable right. However, that is not the defining quality of what makes us American. I could be alive if I was trapped in a gulag in Siberia. I could be kept safe if I was in a box buried 200 feet below the surface of the earth with tubes that provided me food, water, and breathable air. But that's not what the American Revolution was fought for. That's not why millions of men and women have put on uniforms and placed themselves in harm's way. That's not the point of America - to be safe. The point of America is to be free. Our country doesn't exist merely for me to have a place to wake up and go to sleep without being dead. It exists as a place where liberty and freedom underlie everything we do, where our most fundamental social compact requires our government to protect our rights, which were unambiguously spelled out over 200 years ago.
So when the President swore in his oath of office to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, he wasn't promising to keep us safe, he was promising, to the best of his ability, to keep us free.
Now, we've all heard people, defending the President, say "Well, that sounds fine, but the Constitution isn't a suicide pact."
Wrong.
I'll say that again.
Wrong.
Yes it is. Of course the Constitution is a suicide pact. How could it be any different in a country whose very beginning was ushered in by
Patrick Henry - "Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God. I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!"
John Adams - "Liberty must at all hazards be supported. We have a right to it, derived from our Maker. But if we had not, our fathers have earned and bought it for us, at the expense of their ease, their estates, their pleasure, and their blood."
Adams again - "If men through fear, fraud or mistake, should in terms renounce and give up any essential natural right, the eternal law of reason and the great end of society, would absolutely vacate such renunciation; the right to freedom being the gift of God Almighty, it is not in the power of Man to alienate this gift, and voluntarily become a slave."
Benjamin Franklin - "They that can give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Thomas Jefferson - "What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure."
Thomas Paine - "Freedom had been hunted round the globe; reason was considered as rebellion; and the slavery of fear had made men afraid to think. But such is the irresistible nature of truth, that all it asks, and all it wants, is the liberty of appearing."
It is fundamental to our nation, our culture, and everything that makes us who we are that we be willing to risk death, every day, to protect our freedom. Not just on battlefields, but in our daily lives. Freedom isn't free, folks, and that means we all have to be willing to accept some risk in order that our being alive has some meaning other than genetic reproduction.
So, Mr. President, when you use fear to manipulate the country, when you torture and spy and lie in the name of safety, you are as un-American as anyone could possibly be. You violate your oath of office, your status as a citizen of the United States, and sacrifice your humanity.
1 comment:
The Screaming of the Meemies
The Screaming of the Meemies
© 2006 Ross Williams
People just can't get over this. Oooo, our constitutional rights are being imperiled as never before!
Yes, our government lines you up like brainless sheep at the airport to shoelessly magnetometerize you, and x-ray and rifle your belongings without a warrant on the premise that because you want to fly from Tulsa to Phoenix you are a terrorist. But that is acceptable to the vast majority of Americans.
Our government stops hundreds of drivers at a time to sniff breath and check straps without a warrant on the premise that by virtue of driving from home to the store you are a drunk intent on killing someone else, or a brainless dweeb[1] intent on injuring yourself in your inevitable, microscopically unlikely accident. But that is also acceptable to the vast majority of Americans.
Our government wants to eradicate the scourge of illegal drugs so badly that they have started to track anyone who has enough sniffles that they want to use the only effective over-the-counter decongestant – which is no longer over-the-counter. It is behind the counter, with the prescription medications. The premise behind this is that because you want to buy pseudoephedrine you are making methamphetamine out of it. Of the ten or a dozen necessary ingredients in the recipe for meth, there's only two that have a non-industrial use – one is an agricultural fertilizer, and one is an OTC decongestant. The rest are raw chemicals that are fairly difficult to obtain, can only be gotten from theft or purchase from a very limited number of suppliers[2], and controlling and tracking the distribution of these raw chemicals would be trivially easy. So therefore, the government tracks the only consumer-use product in the recipe, which requires hundreds of thousands of individual retailers to keep record of the tens of millions of Americans who purchase the bubble-packed 24-pill box of Sudafed®.[3] And even this seems to be acceptable to the vast majority of Americans.
What isn't acceptable to the wet-panty crowd is that this same government will listen in on phone calls a few hundred Americans make to known terrorists. How evil and unconstitutional can you get???
But wait! There's more!!
We now get word that the Customs folks will – I can barely type the words, the computer screen is just too squiggly from the tears welling up in my eyes – snfff! ... US Customs agents will open your mail if you get letters or packages from parts of the world known to be strongholds of terrorist activity.[4] If you get a letter from the hill country of the Philippines, or a package from the mountains of "tribe-controlled Pakistan", a parcel from the Syrian border-area of Iraq, or a carton from Paris France, you'll get a note from a Customs agent saying that your mail was inspected by US Customs and resealed.
Secret? no. They'll tell you about it. They'll attach a label to your mail: "Opened, inspected and resealed by US Customs", or words to that effect. They're looking for bombs and anthrax spores. Remember anthrax? Our paranoiac X-Files fans still have their cache of cipro in a hermetically sealed medicine chest in the infinitesimal event that they are the one American to be targeted for an anthrax letter.
US Customs may even possibly be looking for messages such as "the infidel raven flies at midnight", or "Ali Baba's forty thieves are in Omar's tent", or even "the Sheik of Araby is waiting by the caravan under the new moon".
But this intrusion is being viewed as inappropriate, "just another example" of how the Bush Administration has declared open warfare on American Civil Rights.
Wah, wah, wah.
The same people declaring that the Bush Administration hasn't done enough to inspect items coming into this country through our seaports are complaining because they have been inspecting incoming mail.
People have their checked luggage warrantlessly rifled by TSA weenies when flying from Tulsa to Phoenix and do not complain about the broken lock, the leaking shampoo in the still-open toiletries case, the wadded papers and the rumpled and torn clothing jammed haphazardly back because they consider the whole thing "necessary". I've actually heard people thank the vandals for slapping a sticker on their suitcase, "Your belongings courteously rifled, pillaged and ransacked by trained barbary apes of the TSA". These same people who have the sheep-like temerity to look and act relieved that their belongings were groped by government-employed high school graduates somewhere between Tulsa and Phoenix are now outraged that a package or letter addressed to them from Kandahar or Fallujah has been opened by US Customs.
I've been desperately trying to divine some correlation between what the perpetually diaper-rashed find acceptable in the way of current civil rights violations and what they find unacceptable. Here they are:
Being warrantlessly stopped on the road, and warrantlessly sniffed for beer and seatbelts: acceptable.
Being warrantlessly tracked and traced for purchasing over-the-counter decongestants: acceptable.
Being warrantlessly inspected before entering a courthouse, school or federal building: acceptable.
Being warrantlessly inspected and groped and sometimes stripped before boarding a flight: acceptable.
Having carry-on luggage warrantlessly x-rayed and sometimes opened and rifled: acceptable.
Having checked luggage warrantlessly x-rayed and sometimes opened and rifled: acceptable.
Having phone calls to or from known terrorists warrantlessly listened to: UNacceptable.
Having mail from terror-besotted parts of the world opened: UNacceptable.
What I've come up with, after I put these all together, is that the acceptable violations of our 4th Amendment "secure in our persons" rights differ from the unacceptable violations in that the acceptable violations deal, in one way or another, with the person as a person, while the unacceptable violations deal with the person as an impersonal number or abstract commodity.
Millions of Americans will line up, happily, to be physically searched, their bodies or their possessions, in any number of ways – on the roadways, at the doors to courthouses, at drugstores, at the airport. But they will whine and whimper and call foul when something that is not directly attached to them – their mail or their phone call – is inspected.
We live in an increasingly impersonal world; we are known by dozens or hundreds of account numbers, ID numbers, drivers license numbers, telephone numbers, addresses... when someone finally takes enough interest in us as a person to personally search and grope us or our belongings, we seem to welcome the contact. The anti-constitutional inspections we object to are the ones which continue to depersonalize us.
"The government thinks enough of me to violate my rights in person, oh how touching...".
"Well, I never! If they can't open my mail in front of me, they can't open my mail at all!"
Have we become that pathetic? Are we that desperate for interpersonal contact that we'll accept violations of our rights – and rationalize them endlessly – in order to get it?
Are there that many of us who need so badly to get laid?
[1] hey, the government isn't always wrong
[2] ditto the fertilizer, by the way
[3] The most costly and difficult means of accomplishing any given task is the one the government chooses... why is this not surprising?
[4] http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/01/09/terrorism.mail.reut/index.html
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