Those that won’t leave you alone
“How loudly we plead our innocence
long after we’ve made our contribution”
-Bill Mallonee
Someday we’ll see the connections. We’ll grasp the enormity of these constitutional missteps we make in the name of security. Someday we may even be able to discuss them without a tinge of partisanship, because we’ll understand that once you embrace an opposite set of values to accomplish even the most justifiable ideals, you’ll have already lost the ends for which you employed those means in the first place.
I didn’t want to write about heavy stuff like torture or domestic spying, but as I see more of the President’s agenda becoming reality, I hate that I haven’t been more open with my reactions.
As I wrote way back in March, I think governmental principles have to be universally applicable, or at least not conditioned on which party is in power. In this case, even more so, because I don’t trust any one man (or secret group of men) to make decisions about when and where to suspend basic constitutional principles like Habeas Corpus, especially within our own borders.
If you would have told me six years ago (or five years ago – even after 9/11/01) how many procedural safeguards would be removed from governmental activity by the fall of 2006, I would have called you crazy. In fact, if you were to come up to me today and tell me the removal of these safeguards is necessary to the continuation of the American dream, I’d probably still have a diminished view of your mental capacity.
It’s as if the fervor for security were a misprescribed pair of glasses causing their wearer to reverse the blueprints of democracy. In a time when every other talking head is crowing over the advent of a more transparent citizenry coupled with less transparent government, I have serious questions about how we’re more secure or free as a result. It really was supposed to be the other way around, wasn’t it?
These advents shouldn’t just frighten those who follow bin Laden’s rally cry. The concerns shouldn’t just be held by those whose partisan blinders push them to oppose anything the current White House does. They should concern anyone who loves this nation and its founding principles, anyone who still wants to believe we’re the good guys.*
Because that last one is a label we’re actively discarding by the day. And someday, even those who stubbornly believe democracy can be carried out in secret rooms, or that civil and human rights can be withheld, not based on facts, but on suspicion alone; someday even they will be able to see those initial steps with which we cast off the burdensome cloak of decency and moral clarity, at the urging of leaders who claimed it obstructed, rather than protected, our once great American dream.
* -Perhaps worth noting is the false dichotomy that suggests we must be the good guys simply because we couldn’t be as bad as those filthy terrorists. Just because our military and intelligence agencies might attempt to counter terrorist agendas doesn’t make us good guys. Saddam Hussein kept terror and resistance groups at bay also, but the means by which he did so, namely ruling his country with an iron (in some cases, genocidal) fist, were justifiably frowned upon.
But then, as President Bush suggested, “If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I’m the dictator.” – a sentiment suggesting perhaps a tiny bit of envy toward the way of leaders like Hussein?
Suffice it to say, in my view, keeping our “good guy” label requires a certain level of adherence to the founding principles, not just opposing people we perceive to be worse than us. We’re heading in the wrong direction, and it doesn’t escape me that part of the terrorist agenda may have been to steer us in the direction we’ve been aggressively heading since 9/11.
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