Americans are pretty stupid when you come right down to it. How else do you explain the surrender of our civil liberties as enshrined in that most sacred of documents, the US Constitution? Yes, Americans still buy the myth that they are a free people living in a free society. I do not know how this can be with the avalanche of evidence to the contrary.
If you are spied on by your own government, a government that clings to the right to execute any citizen it wishes without trial, you are not free.
If the police are a de facto arm of the US military and violate your civil rights under the Patriot Act (yet another ghost to haunt this country left to us from the criminal George Bush), you aren't free.
If you can't criticize the government or march peaceably in protest against it ANYWHERE YOU DAMN WELL PLEASE (fuck those so called free speech zones or when police select where you can or can't protest), you are not free.
Now, if you can't do something as harmless as recording the police, you ARE NOT FREE.
In fact, the only real "freedom" left to Americans is where they can shop. And maybe that's part of the answer to why Americans are so ignorant and dumb regarding their freedom. Maybe all this materialism and choices of stuff to buy make us believe we really are a great and free society when we really aren't. Maybe all these high def tvs and ipods are lulling Americans into a false sense of reality where they are as free as free can be while the federal government and their willing accomplices in state governments are contriving every day to take just one more civil liberty from you and me. How can you not be free when you can go to the mall whenever you please? Ugh!
I suppose as a species us dumb apes are prone to be subservient to the power and might of oppressive governments, as our history on this planet clearly demonstrates. Still, I always believed that we Americans were better than that. I always believed that the frontier spirit that forged this nation would cause Americans to be naturally resistant to the schemes of power by greedy, rich men in government, but I see that was a fallacy I clung to. If it weren't a fallacy, the Patriot Act would never have become law, Bush would have been tried for crimes against this nation and its Constitution. Hell, if Americans still valued freedom, they would have ousted the Bush junta once it was revealed that the Bushies were eavesdropping on our phone calls and reading our e-mails! But they just don't care about their freedoms anymore. The American people have become sheep like the Russians were sheep to the old Czars or the Germans to the Nazi party or even the Romans of the old Republic when Caesar took over.
So let's not have any more of this self aggrandizing illusion that we are a unique and free people. We haven't been free for a very long time.
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