The Patriot Act: Prelude to Revolution?
The Patriot Act, enacted by Congress shortly after 9/11, gave the American government and investigative bodies temporary powers to - if not suspend - at least jiggle, bounce, and slip-slide basic civil rights and liberties. This was done "for the good of the American people."
It's a good thing our government is looking out for us, just like when Russia was looking out for its citizens by seizing the properties of capital/industrialists, and when Germany was looking out for its citizens when they issued orders for Jews to report for registration, just to keep everything straight and in working order. Undoubtedly, many nations have solved certain problems simply by eradicating the rights, freedoms, and very existence of inconvenient ethnic, religious, and economic groups.
Fortunately, America is a civilized Western government, and would never stoop to mass-slaughter of its own people, at least not in a single day, as is permissible in countries where the American CIA has funded the installation of a puppet regime friendly to American business interests, as well as the elimination of economic rivalry at gunpoint -- simply a matter of political expediency. After all: Poor, uneducated, sick people are so expensive to maintain, and by providing the means and intent of slaughtering half the populations of third-world nations, America can take pride in doing what it does best by stimulating economic growth and creating jobs - even if the bulk of those jobs do require the skilled labor of doctors, morticians, and ditch-diggers. The people who cannot afford to pay their own funeral expenses are mercifully removed from the welfare state.
Americans would never accept the indignity of supporting detention camps, unless, of course, people of your ethnic, religious, or economic strata had been accused of masterminding an act of terrorism against America, as happened after Pearl Harbor when Japanese-American citizens were ordered to report to detention camps, and as nearly happened again after 9/11, when it seemed that anyone of a light or dark brown, tan, cocoa, mocha, taupe, burnt umber, raw sienna, or coffee colored complexion could be a mere three-hour flight-training session away from engineering mass murder against our loved ones, and it seems easiest to simply clap them up in a tiny room somewhere without legal representation, or even charges, and/or revoke their citizenships and send them into exile simply by exporting them to the countries whose national allegiance they had already renounced when they took the Oath of Allegiance to the Constitution of the United States.
That many of these Eastern and Middle-Eastern citizens of a light or dark brown, tan, cocoa, mocha, taupe, burnt umber, raw sienna, or coffee colored complexion may have A) actually filed for American citizenship, taken the citizenship test that undoubtedly many born-Americans would fail, and swore an Oath of Allegiance to the Constitution of the United States (which first-born Americans are excused from doing even in high school civics classes); B) be first-, second-, or third-generation Americans with children born on American soil, without so much as a parking ticket on their record in 50 years of American residency; or C) take democracy as a concept far more seriously than born-Americans do, simply because through experience they know the alternative is truly unpalatable -- all these factors seem to go unconsidered, in the American mass-mind, when Racism and Hate seem to be the easy pills to swallow in answer to Fear and Ignorance.
Democracy, like many aspects of written law, is a word that when defined isn't quite defined enough. Like the law, there is the spirit, and the letter. The "letter" of democracy is equality. The "spirit" should include compassion, if not reason.
When the spectre of Terror, and Terrorism, rears its ugly head, it seems as if we, the citizens, look into the eyes of those different from ourselves, and what we see are the serpents of our own fear. That is not only the reflection of the twisted snake, but could probably more accurately be referred to as the Dweller on the Threshold. What many people fail to understand is that the Dweller on the Threshold is not what's on someone else's doorstep - it is what lies on our own.
Humanity as a collective whole is fast approaching a New Age, whether we like it or not. That New Age is as-yet undefined; this is the process we are currently engaged in. It seems many people are going by whatever programming they have been subjected to, or appeared as the path of least resistance to some kind of understanding. What is different about the particular era we are approaching is that separatist-thinking will no longer be an adequate solution even temporarily.
We do not advocate a one-world government - in fact, we oppose it - to the extent that we would prefer 300 "itty bitty wars" around the world (like today) rather than a central body of benevolent despotism. We believe there is a middle ground between the itty bitty wars and one central government, but that the solution of non-conflict has not really been tried on a global scale. It seems, if world history is any indication, that the greatest threat to Humanity is not so much imperialism, but Christian imperialism - or any religion which advocates in theory and practice the implied right for the "winner to take all."
It is that kind of thinking that must be changed before we can really take our place, as a planetary body, not merely in the New Millennium (which really doesn't mean much in a galactic sense - it's really only the humans who tend to have the ego to believe we're the only sentient race in existence) into the Celestial Sphere of Consciousness shared by a multitude of planetary bodies and physical/spiritual races of beings.
It is evidence of despotism, to say the least, when government leaders make a practice of differentiating between Us and Them, because the only logical progression is to descend into the semantics of Good Guys/Bad Guys, Righteous/Profane, and so on. When Religion becomes an anchor for any statesman, the spiritual beliefs are ripped from an individual's personal expression, and become twisted (as a serpent) into a crooked weapon to be used as weapon against one's own people, however well-intentioned -- in the beginning.
It probably seems we have deviated wildly from the topic of this page, and the question of whether the Patriot Act could in fact either lead to (or worse) be symptomatic of, descent into first chaos, then revolution, and possibly even anarchy in its ugliest, most brutal, psychopathic form. Few humans have given any real thought as to just what mass, spiritual anarchy really means. Such a concept almost defies description - simply because - except for very brief periods, there really hasn't been any real state of anarchy in this world, probably since before man was given credit for discovering the wheel.
There has been no real anarchy on this planet in the third dimension. There has been disorder, confusion, chaos, and even violence. There have been times when no one was driving - which is how many people tend to define anarchy. What has not been experienced, on a mass level, is not the idea that no one was driving, but that a "madman" was driving, and that a madman would drive existence into - not just non-creation, but into anti-creation. The madness of such a leader(s) would, we think, contribute to mass, manifested insanity -- simply because Humanity as a mass has not yet learned to acknowledge that those humans who achieve the top of the power structures do not always do so through virtue.
Humans still tend to think that if they push
a certain button, a certain response will ensue. "Pushing these buttons" is what
humans think they do when they vote in presidential elections, and they decide
they have no further responsibility for the next four years. They think
"their" buttons are what drive the government, and they go to sleep
until the next election.
They use the following three rationales for excusable inertia:
1) I voted for this candidate; I was right then, so I must still be right;
2) Well, I didn't vote for this candidate, so it's not my fault, and I am not
responsible;
3) I didn't vote at all, so it's not my fault and it's not my problem.
Democracy is not a natural state of Earth at this time; it was arrived at as a concept, rather than a principle. It has become a principle, and we'd like to keep it. Like the invention of the wheel, just because it was not manifest from the heavens, or a gift from God, does not mean it wasn't possible - or intended. But, like any other gift, such principles only remain valuable as long as they are treasured and maintained in good working order.
Americans have a tendency to wait until something breaks down before they take it in for service, even under warranty. They completely ignore warning lights, funny noises, feelings of unease. We know a person who - when her car starts making funny noises - turns her radio up. Unfortunately, most Americans do the same thing when faced with troubling political issues - they just turn the noise up so they don't have to think about real problems and real solutions.
If America and her declared civil rights were compared to an automobile, we'd say it has a flat tire on the driver's side, a steering wheel out of alignment, needs a new set of shock absorbers, and could probably use a refill of brake fluid, as well as new windshield wiper blades so we can see where we're going while driving in bad weather. The turn signals need to be fixed because everything seems to be going to the radical right. The radio only tunes into propaganda, and the radiator vent is being clogged with messages of intolerance as well as supremacy. The rearview mirror needs to be cleaned, because it has been smeared with political and religious arrogance, and we can't see the Past to learn from it while we drive forward into the Future.
The automobile is still running and has a lot of mileage left, but it's up to all the drivers to see that the car runs safely. In addition, having a car that is updated regularly in legislative action and federal mandates might make the car more powerful and durable - but that car - designed to protect the passengers while destroying pedestrians - is NOT a safe car, and should be treated as a dangerous vehicle.
The Patriot Act is just such a dangerous vehicle, and the government drivers have taken a license to kill by destroying the fabric of civil rights and liberties that are the foundation of the democracy we promote so righteously.
It must be understood that there are too many frightening comparisons between the Patriot Act, and certain legislation enacted by the German government even as such legislation piggy-backed Adolph Hitler to the top of the food-chain. People tend to overlook the fact that Hitler was democratically elected, and it was Hitler who basically "informed" the German people that they were victims of economic terrorism as perpetuated by Communists and Jews, without distinction. "Commie Jew" became known as a singular entity embodied by entire races of ethnic and religious nationalities.
There is documentation in abundance that the American government has endorsed a certain amount of ethnic cleansing in our own country. It is accurate to say that the extermination of Native American Indians was endorsed for centuries, and was in fact national policy - as usual, for economic and religious reasons.
Afro-Americans, especially in the last two centuries, have been targeted for a certain amount of ethnic cleansing. (The cleansing wasn't necessary until after the 13th & 14th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, because as slaves, Afro-Americans had no rights and were not an economic threat.) Hispanic-Americans have also been discriminated against, particularly in the South, because they too are considered an economic - and in a sense, religious threat because Hispanics tend to be of Roman-Catholic faith.
It is believed by many that all races in American not predominately WASP tend to be targeted for cleansing at some point, very often with the introduction of legalized (or easily obtainable) alcohol and drugs, pornography and prostitution, and gambling in a variety of forms. It would not be too much of a stretch to say that even poor white people are targeted by easy access to vice, assuming that those who destroy themselves will never be a real economic threat to the general mass population.
Taxes pay for jails. When there are too many prisons, and too many criminals, the next economic solution will be to turn misdemeanors into capital crimes, and prisons into slaughterhouses. This is essentially what Hitler and the Third Reich did. They got away with doing what they did, for as long as they did, simply because people observing the situation who might have been uncomfortable with "racial reassignment and assimilation" couldn't help but admire that the living standard (for a few) in Germany had undoubtedly instilled greater self-esteem in the people who felt they were acting as part of a solution to a national economic problem.
The Holocaust was not a declared war, nor has it been called a revolution. Unfortunately, "Holocaust" tends to be defined as "the murder of 6 million Jews." This, in our opinion, is too small and limiting a definition. To say that this horror, as the Holocaust was, was centered on a singular crime "murdering Jews" is not sufficient, because it doesn't address the real issue, nor the threat that this can happen again to anyone anywhere. It so happens that in Germany the Jews were targeted. There have been other mass murders, greater numbers slaughtered over a lesser period of time. Too many of those incidents in the 20th century were supported/engineered by the American CIA. (This is documented.)
What really needs to be understood about the Holocaust, in our opinion, is that the truly great horror is that this event was ALLOWED to happen, and that this event was facilitated through mismanagement of democratic policy. Most German citizens truly had no idea they were being led by the nose, and in a sense, their votes pulled the trigger (or the hoses, or the nozzles, or whatever) because they didn't follow through on their elective decisions to see that policies lived up to the spirit as well as the letter of civil law.
The Patriot Act, disguised as a document to facilitate safety through intelligence gathering is simply the first step to doing what the Third Reich did best - by making it easy to gather statistics about dual-nationality citizens, without accountability, of people who are deprived of federal privacy laws and due process. Such people as are targets of this information gathering are denied self-defense because the Patriot Act is shielded from reproof or even examination against the Freedom of Information Act.
Americans are going to have to wake up. Those Americans who opt to simply "go to sleep" to avoid having to deal with their conscience, or the responsibilities of preserving Freedom, are all too likely to wake up and find themselves in the proverbial gas-chambers. Worse, those who go to sleep in this crisis may find they never wake up at all, and it won't be 6 million people who died; it will be a way of life that dies when we turn our backs on defending the democracy that belongs to all of us.
Don't be a back-seat driver. If you are eligible to vote, please do so. It might seem like a spit in the ocean, but it's a big ocean, and every drop counts -- from "Sea to shining Sea."
Love, Galadriel
04/27/2004
Revolution/patriot.htm