The Patriot Act. New Speak for Allowing Others to Manipulate Your Fears

The following post was prompted by the Daily Beast article linked below.

The "Sunset" provisions in the Patriot Act are set to bring its over reaching usurpations of our rights to an end. To which I can only say good riddance. Let us just hope that the congressional proclivities suggested in this article hold true.

I have always held the belief that you don't fight an idea, or another way of living, by becoming less of what is most dear in what is aspired to within your idea, or way of life. What you do, rather, is live those ideals boldly, with as few exceptions as possible; knowing full well that people you care about may suffer, and/or die. That's the whole point of what sacrifice is for something you believe is just as precious as life itself.

Becoming less of what we aspire to as a response to terrorists is simply to keep the initiative in their hands. Showing them that no matter how many of us they might kill, we will just carry on with living the better life that what we aspire to allows us. Not only does this take away any remaining moral ambiguity there might be, it lays bare the horrible truth of their violence and the contrast of that with the poverty and suffering of their own people as they pursue it rather than addressing these needs.

A part of this, of course, is realizing that what we aspire to, in addition to personal liberty, in combination with personal responsibility, balancing the needs of the individual with the needs of the community as a whole, also rejects the injustice of greed, and the tyranny of concentrated power that comes from it.

Too many things have been done in our name to benefit a few. And the primary reason this has come about, and why it remains so, is that Capitalism continues to be our economic operating system. The very system whose very foundation lies upon the "economics of scarcity," as well as the notion that "greed is good."

What is private. What is property. What is commodity, not to mention, what the free flow of information means to the ability of a truly free people to make well informed choices, all become something quite problematic in a system where scarcity, and the control of where, when and how such scarcity is applied, is a virtually certain way of making sure that injustice will always have the upper hand.

You better start thinking seriously about this because the next legislation with a euphemistic title that does things exactly opposite to our ideals will have our nation going down a path to do things at least as terrifying, and destructive, as anything those religious zealots have in mind.



The Patriot Act May Be Dead Forever