Threat Level Orange
The Department of Homeland Security has raised the alert level
for the
likeliness of terrorist attack in America to “High”,
or “Level Orange”. Of course we need to do whatever’s
humanly possible to protect ourselves, but still that’s
a frightening prospect. It’s not however, the only truly
frightening prospect we face today. A few weeks ago in an article
called “The United States of America Has Gone Mad”,
the world’s best-selling author John Le Carre said that
our country has entered a period of “historical madness
worse than McCarthyism…and potentially more disastrous than
the Vietnam War.”
Why? Because America’s reaction to 9-11
“ is beyond anything Osama Bin Ladin could have hoped for
in his wildest dreams.” As a result, just as in McCarthy’s
time, “the freedoms that have made America the envy of the
world are being systematically eroded”.
Le Carre was speaking cautiously. Our freedoms aren’t being
eroded, they’re being blasted in the early stages of a conflict
that’s hardly being talked about. It’s not being waged
against Bin Ladin or Saddam Hussein. It’s an undeclared
war on civil liberties in America, and on the constitutional protection
of the individual from the power of the state.
Scary? Yeah. But what’s scarier is that
the assault’s being led by the President and the Congress
of the United States under the influence of the religious right,
and boy have they got an agenda for us. The House Majority Leader
is very forthright about what that agenda is: He says the Almighty’s
using him to promote “a biblical worldview” in American
politics.
Thomas Jefferson said that the first amendment. (…Congress
shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion…)
required “a wall between Church and State.” Under
the Bush administration, that wall has been coming down in chunks.
As of last week federal housing money, our taxdollars, can now
be used to build, buy, or renovate churches and places of worship.
This isn’t a joke; it’s a reversal of a 208-year-old
precedent, and it’s now federal policy. Last month the President
ordered that religious groups be given our tax dollars for various
programs they run, even if they discriminate on the basis of religion,
sexual orientation, and other things. No joke here either. Last
year the administration backed the Supreme Court’s supreme
undercutting of public education: the use of taxpayer funded vouchers
to pay for religious schools. Soon no doubt we’ll see the
rest of this agenda playing out: The teaching of“creationism”,
the return of “voluntary” prayer to public classrooms,
and, among other things, a revisitation of Roe v. Wade, to try
to force all women and girls who conceive - including rape or
incest victims - to bear children they don’t want to have.
It’s coming, watch.
But these things aren’t even the main issues, which is about
the constitutional protection of our civilliberties, including
the right to privacy, due process, and unreasonable search. In
light of 9-11, it’s clear most Americans are willing to
trade some measure of our personal freedom in return for an enhanced
sense of personal security. That’s reasonable, and most
of us accept that as the world changes, we need to respond.
The 2001 “Patriot Act” passed soon
after 9-11, gave the government sweeping new powers to conduct
electronic surveillance of American citizens on a scale previously
unimaginable, and without protections historically required by
the Courts. Now the administration is about to launch its next
move, an expansion of the Patriot Act to be known as the Domestic
Security Enhancement Act of 2003. Among many proposed “enhancements”,
this will change - at least in some cases - the fundamental basis
of our judicial system from presumption of innocence to presumption
of guilt, requiring suspects to prove why they should be permitted
to post bail, instead of requiring prosecutors to prove why they
should be held.
If you think “Hey, I’m not a terrorist, what do I
care?”, you’re missing the point. If we institutionalize
the unreasonable, or if we change the law of the land from something
based on what our founding fathers believed to something else,
we betray the constitution and the flag that 10 generations of
Americans have fought and died for. If America becomes less and
less the country we’ve known and more and more like Bin
Ladin’s Saudi Arabia, then 9-11 will indeed have succeeded
in destroying the foundations of our civilization. That’s
what Bin Ladin’s always said he wanted, and that’s
what we can’t allow to happen.The cost is just too high,and
our kids don’t deserve to pay the price of growing up in
a country far less free than one we’ve always known.
Last week we watched in horror like we did 17 years before, as
the pride of our nation aboard the shuttle Columbia left this
world of ours, in trying to return to it with more knowledge than
they’d started out. We mourn their loss, many of us have
prayed for the peace and well-being of their families. None of
us, no adult, hasn’t watched some part of our hopes, some
part of the future we imagined, vaporize at one time or another.
We find a way to go on, it’s part of being an adult, or
a country. But the dreams that all of us as Americans share are
built upon
freedoms guaranteed by our constitution. Historically
they’ve been upheld by an executive, legislative, and judiciary
balance we’ve literally NEVER before had reason to think
were marching in step against our nation’s most cherished
personal freedoms. That’s what can happen when one party
guided by a religious ideology controls every branch of our nation’s
governance. “Level Orange” probably doesn’t
describe the threat that poses anywhere near adequately.
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