Wednesday, December 07, 2005
Remember When We Believed In Freedom?
When I was a child, there was this nation that we called the Soviet Union. It was huge...spanning from the westernmost part of Eastern Europe into Asia at some places. I was just a kid at the time and I have no way of knowing what life was really like in that country, but I know what our leaders told us it was like. We were told that the government of the Soviet Union spied on its citizens, that people who disagreed with the government got kidnapped by the KGB (their version of the CIA) and "disappeared" to secret prisons. We were told that people were tortured. And you know what? We all agreed that those things were very, very bad. The Soviet Union was The Bad Guys in our estimation because they were thought to do those things which Americans, living in freedom and democracy, deplored. Who are The Bad Guys now? How can we be The Good Guys if we do those things which define Bad to a free people? Young people growing up now don't even remember back when Americans thought that we had a right to privacy and to fair trials. What has happened to us? Do you feel safer than you did four years ago?
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2 comments:
Even back then, I think we knew that something was amiss.
Yes. What seems so much more shocking to me now is how people think this is okay now...in the permanent sense...I guess it is easy to understand how people would feel so in a crisis. My siblings who are in their teens and early twenties seem to think that torture and secret prisons and the govt. spying on you is just the way things should be...it distresses me so much. I think of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence...so many things gone by the wayside. Things were never even close to great, but there was a belief in the goodness of freedom once...ah, I just get upset.
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