Wake Up! It's 1984 (September '06)

The blog title is a song title from the great New Wave band Oingo Boingo, but the content will be anything but jovial.

Today as I was driving home from work, listening to NPR, the host announced a new government program as something "easing the restrictions" on airline passengers.

Under this new program, all of the items confiscated by airport security will be re-sold at government thrift stores, with the profits going to the state.

I'll say that again. "...with the profits going to the state."

Now the government can take your personal property, confiscated under very nebulous, easily manipulated standards, and re-sell that property to the public for a profit.

IS THIS NOT AN OUTRAGE?!

Yet for all my anger and frustration, this is apparently not even registering as a blip on the popular radar. We have become so utterly numbed and been beaten so far into submission, that we never even begin to question the premise of such a program.

The announcer stated that if you can identify an item as your own, you can have it back for free (assuming of course that you can find it amidst thousands of other items, and assuming that it has not already been purchased, and assuming....) Think about that. How many of the items on your person at this very moment could you prove as your own to a stranger in an institutional setting?

The government will justify this program by saying that the items confiscated were banned items. This is not a valid premise. I had items taken from me at the Philadelphia airport that had already gone through security at the Atlanta airport and flown halfway across the country! What was the difference? The individual doing the search. The items taken did not even technically meet the definition of the current ban...but I was told that in order to keep my belongings I could go back to the back of a two-hour line and check the baggage, missing my flight. In logical argumentation, that's known as a "false choice," and is a readily identifiable fallacy.

So what can you do if you disagree? Absolutely nothing. Should you make any public attempt to decry this sort of imposition, you will be branded as "unpatriotic" or "un-American," and dispensed with accordingly. You can rage against The Machine, but The Machine cares not at all. The Machine moves forward, and if it should grind up and destroy those it serves in the process, so be it.

Did you know that right now a policeman can arrest you solely on the strength of his word that you have committed a crime? You can be arrested, brought to jail, have a bail set, and if you have no means of paying this bail, you can sit in jail for months until your trial, during which time you cannot work, you cannot pay your bills, you cannot even access other people on a regular basis! Furthermore, if the powers that be determine that you have caused a problem of any sort while in jail, they can charge you further and hold you indefinitely! This can be on any grounds from "obstruction of justice" to certain traffic violations!

So if you do finally get out, you have no more assets, ruined credit, a damaged reputation, and no real recourse for compensation. Sure you can get a lawyer, if you have money...but wait, you don't have that anymore, do you?

Are you aware that there are now chips that you can get implanted in yourself or your child to track location and maintain personal ID information? There have even been proposals to implement the implantation of such a chip into all children shortly after birth--supervised by the government, of course. Nobody is really clear on exactly who can use this information or for what purposes, but trust your government, they know what's best for you, right?

How did all of this come about? How did we get to the point where a nation that was founded on the basis of individual freedoms and the right to freedom from excessive and unwanted taxation now takes almost 30% of your paycheck each year? How did we get to the point where you cannot go from point A to point B without submitting to a search of yourself and your belongings? How did we get to the point where you cannot so much as take a walk in the woods or a trip to the mountains with any assurance that you are not being watched?

I'll tell you how. Fear and Conflict.

The income tax was started under President Lincoln and was enacted along with several other taxes in order to fund the war against evil powers that seek to do harm to us and to our nation.

Fast forward to World War 2. American citizens were stripped of their belongings and placed in concentration camps. Why? In order to protect us against evil powers that seek to do harm to us and to our nation.

I'll skip ahead again to Vietnam. Thousands of young people were drafted into mandatory military service? Why? I think you can guess by now.

Now we are quite literally witnessing the loss of new personal freedoms on an almost daily basis. Congress is spending BILLIONS more of your dollars, and all the while tightening the noose around what is left of your civil rights?

Why? I'll give you one guess.

The next time you want to talk about the greatness of representative government, ask yourself how much say you had in any of the above. Ask yourself how much power you have as an individual against the whims and intentions of your own government. Ask yourself how much say you really have in what your own representative says or does on your behalf in Washington.

Do you like the answers? I sure as hell don't.

Tell me what you think. It just might be the only real say you have in anything these days...

(P.S.--If you like this blog, please publicize it in some way. I'd like a lot of people to see this one, and perhaps even be moved to think....)