Anyone who knows me at all knows that I generally detest Glenn Beck. He, and pretty much all the other AM radio right-wing pundits are all crocks.
Until I read this article.
Actually, I didn’t actually go to a Glenn Beck site just to read an article. I knew he had a website, even a lot of aging grandmothers have web sites these days; but instead I read somewhere else that Glenn Beck had something positive to say about something, and not being able to believe it, I then went to the Glenn Beck website to see for myself.
For years I have been telling my friends and family that privacy has gone to hell in a handbasket. Last year I even cancelled my Facebook account because I grew tired of the ever-changing privacy standards. Like the little boy and the dike, I just ran out of fingers trying to plug all the privacy holes that keep popping up.
I do still have email accounts that I read on occasion. I also sent texts on my phone, mostly to my kids and the one or two people I play on-line games with, but I simply refuse to participate in most on-line social media. I do not have a twitter account and don’t forsee ever needing or wanting one.
My feelings were recently justified with the exposure that our government is turning out to be just as ugly and nasty about spying on it’s own people as the Nazi’s ever were, as the East Germans ever were, as the Russians ever were. Name a single oppressive government of the 20th and 21st century, and you have to put our own United States Government right up there in the top five.
Because our society has turned into such a bunch of fraidy-cats, Congress, since the 9-1-1 terrorism event, has slowly been legislating away our individual freedoms, and we’ve been napping at the wheel and letting them do it.
We don’t need a tyrant, we have our own do-nothing Congress to thank for our loss of privacy and freedoms.
As a society, we have become so accustomed to having things done for us by our government, that we are perhaps no longer even capable of doing for ourselves. That is a frightening thought. If true, why do we need the constitution anymore and what possible safeguards actually still exist under it that can’t simply be legislated away by Congress?
I think our founding fathers simply had no idea how big and complicated life would get. They probably had no idea that the planet would grow to hold nine billion souls, with no end in sight. That a single “farmer” could grown enough food to support tens of thousands from a single field. That food would be genetically altered. That concrete roadways would link every single village, or that nearly everyone would have access to air travel and be able to cross the planet in a day.
We keep saying that our constitution is strong enough to withstand all the attacks on it, but I’m beginning to wonder.
At some point, when we weren’t looking, we gave the President the ability to send troops off to foreign lands, without actually declaring a war – something that the constitution reserves for Congress. Of course, Congress is a mess, but maybe things like this should be debated at length and our founders knew this, which is why they thought they had that base covered, never thinking that Congress itself would abdicate that responsibility.
Some of the young people I know think that our government should be able to invade our privacy, because “I’m not doing anything wrong so I’m not afraid of anyone looking.”. People who think this way are missing the entire point of what it means to be independent, free-thinkers, self-reliant and responsible for our own actions. With the government spying on our every word, thought or action, how can we rid ourselves of them in order to forge a more perfect union? What if King George III had been able to stifle all communications between the rebels? What if he had known, by virtue of spying on every meeting, reading every mailed letter, listening in on every conversation, the thoughts of every American patriot? How far would we have gotten?
Every single one of us needs to communicate with our elected government and let them know that this simply cannot continue. That “PRISM” and any other such monitoring should cease. If we are so afraid of our own shadows that we have to intrude on every citizens life in such a manner, then we have already lost to the enemy and become one with them.
We should also contact those internet companies of which we are customers and insist that they protect our privacy and not sell it off to the highest bidder, or give access to our private lives to the U.S. Government without a properly executed and specific search warrant.
1984 has arrived. A bit late, but it is in full force.