Song of the day: For What It’s Worth Artist: Buffalo Springfield Album: Buffalo Springfield Released: 1967

“The powers in charge keep us in a perpetual state of fear, keep us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil to gobble [...]]]> “Those who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty nor security.” — Benjamin Franklin

“The powers in charge keep us in a perpetual state of fear, keep us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant sums demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real.” — General Douglas MacArthur

I feel much less safe today than I did prior to 9/11. The President and the Republinazi Party want us to believe that they are keeping us safe from all the bogeymen out there — be they homosexuals, Islamic terrorists, or some other perceived but vague threat. It’s not that I feel less safe from terrorists. I feel less safe from my own government. We shouldn’t feel safer from terrorists just because they haven’t made another attack; that’s a false sense of security. They’re just waiting for the right moment. They have the advantage of time; they can wait longer than we can. They choose the time and the place; we don’t have any say in it.

My family and I have lived under the daily threat of terrorism and we lived relatively normal lives. It can be done but not through irrational, half-assed, knee-jerk reactions. Granting special powers to the government to protect us from a vague threat isn’t the answer. Any power given to the federal government is rarely, if ever, revoked. Bombing the shit out of some country where terrorists may be hiding is fruitless. They’ll just move somewhere else. Pissing off our allies isn’t the answer either. There will come a time when we need them. We cannot remain in a position of power for long without allies; we can’t go it alone in today’s world.

If the election showed us anything, it showed us that we are not an informed citizenry and the campaigns took advantage of that. Both parties based their campaigns on fear, uncertainty, and doubt; they played on our emotions and our ignorance. They kept us confused. The truth is out there but there’s a lot of crap to shovel out of the way first. We were lied to by both campaigns; they led the party faithful like sheep to the slaughter. It was not an honorable election. It was downright shameful. I’m sure the upcoming rigged elections in Iraq will be more honorable than the campaign that just ended.

The most fearful words you can ever hear are, “We’re from the government and we’re here to help you.” The government never has your best interests at heart.

As a side note, I am not a bleeding heart liberal. I am actually quite conservative in most things. I live by a strong moral code. I believe in God and I read the Bible. But I let no one tell me what to think or what I should believe.