Papers

Pawns in a Political Country

October 2008

I remember hearing, first hand, from a gentleman whose uncle participated in an Alabama school program during the 1940s where he ingested radioactive cereal. The resulting health consequences were significant, as he later died from many forms of cancer. He seemed convinced it was a government conspiracy, and I read later of the same phenomenon in Waverly, Massachusetts - lawsuits directed at a local school for conducting experiments of radioactive iron on human subjects.

I like to think we've grown beyond such immoral horrors in the past fifty years, but the adage that history repeats itself should keep us diligent. Even the trivial of societal mistakes share a common root with the more egregious offenses: a lack of transparency in all forms of government. Many of us feel powerless about recent events in our country, not because we think they are entirely unjustified, but because they lack the transparency for anyone to understand what's happening behind the curtain. Whether your peeve is entrusting an economic bailout plan to the same twits who broke the economy, or the abuse by our NSA's wiretapping plan, most of what makes us feel powerless in society is that such plans come with little oversight. Transparency in government has no doubt been the catalyst to many great abuses in this country. When a government begins operating in secret, they've lost their credibility and trustworthiness.

The thing to remember about transparency is that those in government don't usually think they need it, and don't have the insight to mitigate power until power is abused. We've seen such examples both locally and on a federal level. Our fourth amendment rights have been castrated in the name of security, and we may soon face the same surveillance dilemma as the United Kingtom, who has a camera for every 14 subjects living in Britain. Lets hope our country has more common sense, for the fourth amendment is nothing to be taken lightly, and most certainly applies to our privacy in public - it is the reason we cannot be arrested without cause, and why we don't answer to "papers, please", as in Hitler's Germany.

As Your Town, USA, you should be considering policy that adds more transparency to the local government, and demanding from your state reps to add the same to federal and state policies. Any administration that seeks to conduct a program in secret is an enemy of the foundation to which our country was built on - one that reserved power and authority to the people. By misleading and misinforming the people, and throwing veils of secrecy over projects we finance, bureaucrats have betrayed our consent and made themselves lords over us, rather than public servants.

Private agendas and greed drive many facets of our state and federal governments, and today, both of our presidential candidates go so far as to buy our votes by promising the biggest tax cuts. Ben Franklin once wrote, "When the people find they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic." Wherever we lean politically, it seems that we are no longer deemed as the represented power of this country, but as an audience to appease; an ignorant talk show crowd easily entertained.

Our country desperately needs to return to a place where the people hold a position of honor and power. All forms of government should be made transparent and held accountable to the people. The apathy of the American people has allowed our leadership to seek self-serving agendas that the majority of Americans do not support. The only way this can be rectified is if the good people of this country get off their couches and vote this election, and the next election, and the next one, until enough of the tyrants running this country have been voted out, and replaced with men and women who love America and respect the people.

Many choose not to vote, believing the republic is already dead, and wait patiently for the next civil war. Another civil war may be in our future, but it will most certainly be caused by those same apathetic Americans who allow the country to fail. We've had many worse enemies to contend with in history; the tunnel vision of the average non-voting American is their Achilles heel. Diplomacy may fail, but it may also succeed. If it fails, it fails, but if there is a modicum of hope that this country can pull ourselves out of the grave, and can abandon our direction towards social communism, then we can only do so if people start believing that their vote can be used just as effectively as a weapon to smite the enemy, and exercise it with this intention, rather than withhold it as a tool only capable of reward.

We must send some message to our government, but that message does not need to be limited to a single election. The flushing of our congress through the repeated voting out of tyrants, and making the voice of the people heard once more by way of letters and protest is the only way our government will understand the direction we insist they take.

Without that voice, playboys and dictators will continue to rule our country, and in your apathy, with silent consent.

Reproduction prohibited without permission