Monday, February 16, 2009

Embrace the Fight

What we don't know keeps the contracts alive and movin'
They don't gotta burn the books, they just remove 'em
--Zach de la Rocha, Rage Against the Machine

There is perhaps in no better time than the present in the United States to prove these two lines true.

Our House of Representatives, the people that have been elected to represent our interests as people, have passed a bill that they themselves have not even read, and that the American people in general know absolutely nothing about.

Our Senate, the more parliamentary of the two bodies that make up the legislative branch, and purportedly those members of the legislative branch that are to act with far more deliberation in their activities, were no better in the process. Indeed it seems they may even have acted more hastily, and more egregiously therefore.

All of this comes at the behest of a president acting, not in the interests of the people of a country he has been elected to lead, but in the interests of claiming a victory for himself, by any means necessary. This president has spewed forth the politics of fear like no president before him since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He does not tell us that we have the Soviet nuclear threat to worry us. He does not tell us that we have the threat of an unseen, unknown network of terrorists to worry us. He tells us that we have ourselves to be afraid of. He tells us that our ideologies have been wrong. He assures us that we should pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, to pay no attention to the facts, to pay no mind to any past government involvement in disrupting individual freedom. He assures us, as did that president, so highly esteemed by so many despite his failure to improve the country over the course of more than three terms until his death, that we have nothing to fear but fear itself. The road will be hard, we are told. The road will be hard and it will be long, but we will struggle through and persevere.

This is a crisis of unprecedented proportions. We are told that only the government can bring about the necessary change. We are told that we must act now. We are told that we must not know what the legislation reads. We are told that we must allow the government to move forward. This is a crisis. Action must be immediate.

Action must be immediate in order that we be kept in a climate of panic and fear over how even to provide tomorrow's food for our children. We can't be allowed to know that this is not the climate in which we truly reside. If we knew better, the contract would most certainly not be alive, much less moving.

At the same time, as any voice of the opposition to the exponential growth this government is about to undergo is heard, listened to, and admired; as these voices grow louder and more popular, we find our government in an all too familiar historical position.

But our growing Leviathan knows its history, and better than we give it credit for. It knows its past failures, and it remains determined to correct them. It knows the failures of that all too familiar historical position as well, and knows that indeed there is no necessity to physically burn the books, merely quietly, and slowly, to remove them.

We are living the creation of George Orwell's 1984 as we breath every one of our most recent breaths. We have seen established the practice of doublethink. We have heard spoken the words of Newspeak. We are surveilled daily by Big Brother.

Will we continue to stand by while our government grows?

Will we continue to be ignorant of our surroundings, allowing the contracts to move?

Will we watch them remove the books that speak to us, that guide us to think independenty and impede their growth?

Will we accept and celebrate Oceania's victory over Eurasia?

I will not. I refuse.

I will embrace knowledge.

I will embrace liberty.

I will embrace freedom.

I will embrace my independence.

I will embrace the fight for all of these things.

Will you?

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