Keeping Safe From Freedom

    It is a fool's errand to pursue security at the expense of freedom. We, as a technologically and intellectually advanced society, owe ourselves the responsibility to endeavor to balance threats to our safety with threats to our privacy, to our freedom to take the road best suited to our individual and collective journeys. To develop a moral and social contract with our fellow human beings that prevents infringement upon their freedoms. To allow only such government as is least intrusive, while still meeting our needs as a nation and as a world. To allow politicians to advance across lines clearly delineated in our Constitution and Bill of Rights weakens the position from which we bargain for our own freedoms and opportunities.

     And so here we stand, or sit, or graze, calling out injustices and governmental abuses and yet refusing to lift a finger to stop them. It is not about the individuals in office, or which party has subjected the population to worse transgressions against their inherent rights. No, it is about a system as a whole that has become so bloated, so easily influenced by the powerful, so easily corrupted, that the common man screams uselessly into the wind fully aware that he is not changing a thing. While CEO's and Congress and Presidents and Lobbyists all conspire to draft laws that benefit only those parties involved in the discussion, public discourse has reached a sort of dead end. We sit here on a million soapboxes (much like the one I've scrambled onto for this impromptu essay), drowning each other out, while the organized media continually parrots points of view that are inherently harmful to the propagation of the greatest and worst species to have existed thus far.

     We have been given this plastic shovel and told to go build our castles, castles whose design can be intricate, complex, and beautiful, but are easily erased by the tide of propaganda pouring forth from the ocean of dollars political discourse has found itself drowning in. I say we cast off these false tools for change, discard the placebos we are fed to keep us sated, and utilize the only power that has yet to be fully stripped from us. Change begins within each of us, now we must spread that seed over a government that is taking from us the water and sunlight we need to survive, to thrive and grow in this ever-changing world. We must throw off the shackles of the bureaucracy we have created and demand those inalienable rights we once held so highly, so untouchable, not just for ourselves, but for every human being on this planet.

     Even if we only allow them an inch at a time, a small compromise to our freedom here and there that they may better protect our interests, even then, those inches become miles after enough years have passed. It is apparent in every day society, in the sense of general apathy. This mess did not appear overnight, there is no single point that one can look back and say "This is where we screwed up", it is a collection of errors and transgressions on our part, a slow path toward failure as a nation to embrace the ideals that we once stood for, for fear of what? Our own ability to protect that which we have fought so hard to earn? For fear of the threats to freedom we have faced? No terrorist organization has done more to damage our freedom than our own government. While loss of life is certainly a tragedy wherever it occurs, the government reaction to these attacks have negatively impacted exponentially more lives than the attacks themselves.

    And that is how a dead man claims victory. That is how a terrorist regime that has suffered defeat after defeat on the battlefield can say they've won the war. Because they changed us, for the worse. When our own country submits to the human rights abuses we pretend to protect others from, then they have won. They have brought us to their level, and though our murders may be sanctioned by our laws, they are still murders, and no more justified than any other. When our government passes laws defining what kinds of torture is permissible to us, rather than outright banning it, we are lost. When our government must monitor its own citizens to 'protect' us from an invisible threat, we are lost. And it is only a matter of time before such behavior leads to one of two outcomes. Full on submission to governmental control, or revolution. Any true American has the responsibility to choose the latter before the former, as clearly stated in the Declaration of Independence.

     To answer the hopeless souls screaming against the wind, one man can do nothing and everything. It may take an entire nation to enact such a paradigm shift, but it takes only a single good idea to unite the nation to that cause. Misdirection is the means by which our freedoms have been slowly whittled away, the truth is the currency we will use to purchase them back.