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/