The sky is falling, the sky is falling...

In further Chicken Little behavior, Ashcroft, Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush II have further set the country on edge , for what I believe is purely political gains. It is unfortunate that such vague warnings and proclamations happen when they can serve no valuable purpose other than to scare people, and convince them not to change anything in the government, because that might put them at risk.

In the months since 11 September 2001, we have watched our liberties erode , and “leaders” of this once great nation make proclimations [look near the end] that are chilling in the least, and honestly Orwellian in their strive for complete domination of the thought of the American public. We have forgotten in a few months what it took 200 years to discover—-that our strength is our diversity, and our pursuit of an ideal of freedom that is not the “Freedom to spend,” but the Freedom to pursue life in whatever means will bring happiness.

Benjamin Franklin once said “they that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety,” and in a short sentence encapsulated both the striving for liberty, but also the burdon of it. Freedom does not come without a cost, and in a society where personal responsibility has been torn assunder, and burried like some antiquated idea, given only lip service when it suits the political needs of a power monger, and where there is a McDonalds on every street, and the definition of Freedom is the ability to choose between 10 radio stations controlled by 2 companies, playing 40 songs on repeat chosen by “hit makers,” the idea that Freedom has a cost is long since lost.

There was a day when people would take up arms against their oppressors, and pursue them, run them out of the country, but that time is nothing more than a lesson in a history book, but never an archetype to which today’s childeren aspire. To do so would require forgoing perhaps some of the comforts of a pre-planned life, whose primary freedom is the freedom to consume, and the freedom to spout ideaology that is radical—-so long as its radical in the current accepted vein.