Shame on you if you fool me once... shame on me if you fool me twice!
You will see one of two things in your lifetime:
1) You will see the fall of the most powerful democracy the world has ever known
-or-
2) You will see a country find it's way out of a haze of fear and once again shine as a beacon of hope.
We are a country built on a principle that I can only describe as 'fragile'. We call it Freedom. A word that has been twisted from it's original meaning in an effort to protect the American way of life. We can not pick and choose who freedom belongs to. We can believe in freedom or we can become like those that threaten everything we have built. Any person that believes that we should strip even one person of their freedom to 'better' the lives of the many is not a promoter of freedom; they are the one that wishes to destroy it. Freedom is a delicate idea. You are either free or you aren't. There is no gray area. The gray area that America has fallen into is not freedom.
There are two steps to maintaining freedom...
First: Inform yourself
You can watch the two videos in my entry below as a start or you can turn on the news. Our major enemies are no longer in a far off place. These enemies are in your own backyard and are taking your freedom away a little bit at a time. You may not even have noticed it was happening. I didn't.
Second: Take action or support those who will do so in your honor...
If you want to help... here's are two good places to start: http://www.amnesty.org/ & http://www.aclu.org/
Liberty is not something that is freely given to the masses by those in power. If you are not willing to fight against those who would use your own fear against you so that they can assume absolute power, then freedom is no longer something that you deserve. Do something... as little as it may seem. Join a protest, write a letter, donate a couple dollars, or better yet, Vote. As distant and all-powerful as the government would like you to believe that it is, the real power still is in your hands. Rather, the real power is in the hands of those that choose to use it.