Category Archives: 2011

Yesterday I was talking on the phone with my friend, Rich, in North Carolina.  We were discussing this ‘indefinite detention’ thing going on in Congress and the fact it’s a lead-pipe cinch it’s going to happen.   The US Government is defacto eliminating habeas corpus.

The conversation kept drifting back to the question, “How in the world did we get here?  How did it come to this?”

The answer always came back the same.  “We followed the yellow brick road.”  We did it.  He did it.  I did it.  We all did it.  We saluted, marched in step, ignored the unpleasant obvious, and allowed ourselves to be cogs in a giant wheel.   We closed our eyes and Rip Van Winkled our way into this.

We abdicated.  When we saw our energy needs exceeding our capabilities to produce energy we took the comfortable route of ‘protecting’ sources someone else owned and kept the thermostats where they were.   We wanted government services we couldn’t afford, so we signed the chits to let our descendants pay for it.  When we saw the elected officials rubber-stamping the desires of multi-national corporations to move our production and manufacturing to countries where someone else could do it, we tacitly helped fill the void with government jobs.   We watched them add layer after layer of new cop functions at every level.  We watched them militarize the police throughout the country.  We cheered as they imposed increasingly draconian measures of ‘protection’ of us against the microscopic threat our lives would be touched by terrorism.

We marched in step because it was the easy way and trusted someone else would pay the price.

We’re there now.  There’s no going back.  There’s not a damned thing you, I, anyone can do about it.  It’s time to salute the future.  Congress and the president wouldn’t have done this if they didn’t plan to use it.

Sometime during the next few years you’re going to have some choices to make.  You can watch them haul off people you don’t like for indefinite detention.  You are going to watch that, whether you like it or not.  But since you don’t like those people anyway it will be easier to accept.

So long as it’s someone else.

We’re there and we’ve gotten what we paid for.

I don’t know about you, but it seems to me to be a strange place to find ourselves.  Hog-tied, handcuffed, at the absolute mercy of the whims of people we were crazy ever to trust and really never did.

Old Jules