Anyone foolish enough to vote for an Orwellian titled law, Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA Patriot Act), should not be allowed to run for dog catcher in Dogpatch. The White House, United States Senate, and House of Representatives should certainly be off limits to anyone so cynical or so stupid that they would not see the dangers inherent in such legislation.

Nothing symbolizes the lack of integrity of American politicians or the public acceptance of state power more than the Patriot Act. Just as the Help America Vote Act will disenfranchise voters, the Patriot Act has endangered our freedoms and increased the power the federal government has over our lives. The only thing worse than the existence of the act is the shameful manner in which congress has ceded its constitutionally granted authority to the White House and the ironically named Department of Justice.

Just 45 days after September 11, 2001 the United States Congress gave in to patriotic fervor and its own spinelessness and passed the Patriot Act with hardly any debate (see , February 27, 2003). Only one member of the Senate, Democrat Russell Feingold of Wisconsin, had the courage to vote against the legislation. Massachusetts Senator John Kerry dismisses criticisms of the act as mere “haggling.”

It is disconcerting when our civil liberties are likened to souvenir shopping while on vacation in a foreign country. The days and weeks following September 11th were the worst possible time to act on legislation that decreased individual rights and increased government rights. It was most certainly time to debate how much power government should have over the lives of its citizens. Americans face an uphill battle in protecting their civil liberties no matter who wins the presidential election in November.

Acronyms like the USA Patriot Act have a long and dubious history in the fight against government controlled domestic terrorism. The Counter Intelligence Program, Cointelpro, sewed seeds of distrust among the Black Panthers and other groups and kept activists under surveillance. Three decades after its existence the word Cointelpro evokes images of a real life conspiracy so frightening that it still makes every other conspiracy theory, plausible or not, difficult to dismiss.

Unfortunately American memories are short, even in the Black community. It is easy to dismiss presidential candidates from the Yale Skull and Bones Society, but individuals and institutions who used to be thought of as friends are not, and should be treated accordingly.

Ministers subjected to Cointelpro surveillance now prove their Christian activism credentials by extolling the virtues of an overly violent film about Jesus whose director says that Protestants are going to hell. These same members of the clergy have forgotten that Jesus had nothing good to say about governments or money and yet they swooned and bowed down to Caesar to get cold hard cash doled out through George Bush's Faith Based Initiative. The Faith Based Initiative should be done away with for no other reason than its initials are the same as the agency that gave us Cointelpro. A program meant to help religious groups should not remind anyone of J. Edgar Hoover.

While President Bush uses the Patriot Act as an election year tool Black leaders bicker about whether or not gay marriage is a civil rights issue. There are serious legal and moral issues involved with granting marriage rights to same sex couples, but it won’t matter much if the government doesn’t need to show probable cause in order to get search warrants and then doesn’t have to inform us that we have been searched.

It is time for civil disobedience in America, and the targets this time around are not the usual suspects. We will have to take ministers and politicians to task when they tell us Wal-Mart is a good place to work. Elected officials should be dead politically if they make asinine comments such as these when asked about Wal-Mart's labor practices: “I don't know about them because I go in there and shop. I'm not trying to get into their business” (Black Chicago Alderwoman Emma Mitts).

If ministers are truly concerned about the state of the Black family they should also speak out against a corrections system that is built to incarcerate as many Black people as possible. Gay people can’t compete with mandatory minimum drug sentences in causing damage to Black families. Taking on the powerful is more difficult than making trite comments about Adam and Eve versus Adam and Steve.

These same preachers will have to be reminded that Jesus Christ was killed because he spoke out against the powerful religious leaders of his day. If they can’t muster the courage to speak for the estimated 10,000 Iraqi civilians killed by U.S. military intervention, we may just have to hold church in our own living rooms while they pose for photo ops with President Bush.

If we are going to rid ourselves of the reactionary, the retrograde, the ignorant, and the cynical, we have to start speaking out against all of them. Their color and their past history should not change what we say or how we say it. 2004 should not be remembered only for the Olympics, leap year and a presidential race. It should be remembered as the year that Americans declared they are mad as hell and are not going to take it anymore.

Margaret Kimberley’s Freedom Rider column appears weekly in .  Ms. Kimberley is a freelance writer living in New York City.  She can be reached via e-Mail at [email protected]. You can read more of Ms. Kimberley's writings at http://freedomrider.blogspot.com/