Americans, refuse to be terrorized

 

After the attacks in Boston this week, which took the lives of four people, including an 8-year-old boy, and inflicted injuries like those seen in war on dozens of others, the President this morning praised Americans’ supposed refusal “to be terrorized.” I think that sentence is missing an important comma, which would make it into the imperative it deserves to be.

Many Americans, since 9/11, have hardly refused to be terrorized. In fact, some of us practically make a living out of cowering in fear. The usual suspects, like professional pants-wetter Lindsey Graham and professional Lady Macbeth Liz Cheney, are calling for us to go ahead and shred the constitution. Enemy combatant! No rights! Military tribunal! Fortunately, they are not being heeded, this time (well, except for that whole Miranda warning thing). Because Muslim terrorists are supermonsters, don’t you know, who must be whisked away from our tried and true system of laws, disappeared into a dark hole that exists totally outside the constitutional framework of justice.

And there will be others who want more cameras, less privacy (if that’s even possible), more police powers, more NSA data mining of everything everyone says, does or thinks, less immigration, more brutal border controls (again, if that’s even possible). The unprecedented “lockdown” of a major American city won’t be enough to satisfy their authoritarian thirst, whether they thirst, like Cheney, to be the boot of oppression, or like Graham, Hannity, O’Reilly, and so many more, to be the followers, toadies and lickspittles of a police state. The calls for overreaction will be coming soon, and the shock doctrine dictates that further eviscerations of our freedoms will be slipped quietly into every piece of legislation available. (CISPA, anyone?)

Meanwhile, the fertilizer plant explosion in Texas, which killed at least fourteen people, and was the result (most likely) of poor safety measures in a plant that had not been inspected since 1985, will result in nothing. OSHA’s pathetically small budget for inspections will not be increased, and the crumbling of America can continue apace.

But if we were to actually refuse to be terrorized, and actually valued our freedoms, the exact opposite scenario would ensue. Law enforcement would be praised for its good work on the Boston case, the notion of locking down a whole city would be appropriately questioned and evaluated, and no one would contemplate giving the government more spying powers over us, the people. And because freedom means the freedom to go to work without worrying that your employer’s cost-cutting will cost you your life, inspections and enforcement of safety rules for dangerous industries would be fully and swiftly funded.

We don’t operate that way, though. America is no longer a country that does things for itself. We are a country that does things to itself. Undermining the basic foundations of both the physical infrastructure of our daily lives though neglect, and through deliberate harm like the sequester, and the legal, constitutional basis for liberty and democracy itself through creeping fascism are the new American way. That is, unless we really refuse to be terrorized and really start valuing freedom.