tp230.xml

tp230.xml

born-digital

story

yes

no

2003-03-10

September 11th caused in us, as a nation, a tremendous insecurity. Like
children afraid to sleep when there is lightning and thunder outside our
windows, we have wished for the government to stay with us. There's only
one problem: we aren't children, and the lightning and thunder of the
past year have come not from terrorists, but from our own government.
We've been subjected to repeated assaults upon our Constitutional
rights, plans to pit neighbor against neighbor as spies, plans of war to
which none of our forebearers would have consented, all of which have
been promulgated by an administration attaining office without mandate
for such. In our distraction, we have let decades of enviromental law
and international treaty work be flushed away by corporate interests
with ties to our current administration.

We have yet to understand that our votes in the 2000 election prompted
what has happened to us since September 11th and before. We have yet to
understand that our future votes are all that can undo this damage,
domestically and internationally. Why have we come to this? Perhaps
because our only news sources seek to focus us on the administration's
message--war is necessary, war is inevitable, war is... whatever the
administration wants it to be.

To be truly free, to be truly self-governed, we must instruct our
representatives in Congress in what we wish for our future. We cannot
leave that task to those compromised by the wealth of corporations. If
we do, those representatives will act in the interest of corporations,
rather than in the interests of the majority of individual citizens.

Unless we, as citizens, stop the insanity by our votes, we will live
with institutionalized insanity--a drift towards fascism, and a constant
fear of everything and everyone from without and within.