A letter to my family and friends...
I've been so concerned with everything that's going on, I broke down and wrote this to send to them. A lot of them will not like it, but I can't walk on eggshells with them anymore.
It's time I spoke up with my own words. I cannot remain silent anymore, even if it costs me personally. All I hope is that my words don't fall on deaf ears, and that my concerns are not just brushed off. I have been personally affected by what is happening, and I want others to know what I feel.
I am afraid. Everyday I step out into a world unlike anything I ever thought truly possible - a world of my worst fears. If only I could convince myself that I was afraid of shadows, I could then ignore that quiet voice inside that sees the things I wish were not there.
America is no longer the land of the free.
Our democratic republic officially died when five Supreme Court Justices, led by Chief Justice Rehnquist, installed George W. Bush as president of the United States. Despite the distractions of hanging chads and butterfly ballots, the fact remains that thousands of mainly black, mainly Democratic voters were purged from the voter rolls before the 2000 election by Bush's brother Jeb and Katherine Harris through DBT Technologies (now known as Centerpoint). Massive vote fraud occurred in Florida, to the rightful outrage of all Americans who know the available, but underreported, facts. When Bush still teetered on the edge of losing the state despite the vote-fixing, Katherine Harris stopped the recount - a conflict of interest, as she was co-chair of Bush's election campaign in Florida. The United States Supreme Court then took the unprecedented and unConstitutional step of illegally selecting Bush as president. These facts are widely known outside this country and in the alternative media here, yet many of my fellow citizens simply refuse to even consider this act - a bloodless coup d'etat - as possible.
Then came the accounting scandals. Enron, Tyco, WorldCom - which, despite being guilty of the most massive corporate fraud in United States history, has just won an $11,000,000,000 government contract to build a cellular phone network in Iraq. Kenneth Lay, CEO and fraudster-in-command at Enron, conspired with his fellow crooks to steal people's life savings, and has done exactly zero days in jail and paid zero dollars in fines. Little surprise, as Enron was Bush's biggest campaign contributor in no less than three elections - Bush's two governships and the 2000 election. No surprise that the Bush administration, which used Enron jets cost-free during the Florida recount debacle and whose leader refers to Lay as "Kenny Boy", would decline to seriously pursue the conspirators of this crime.
I was affected by Enron's fraud. Remember hearing about the rolling blackouts in California, the jacked-up prices (Enron overcharged the state of California by billions), the conservation measures? I dealt with them. I paid the doubled electricity bills due to Bush's corporate friends, who met with Dick Cheney on the Energy Task Force - the same task force that Cheney refuses to release documents from, defying a court order. But this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Bush administration policies affecting me personally - policies which will affect everyone as they consolidate their power.
On Tuesday, September 11, 2001, I woke up to the news from my then-girlfriend's mother - "Terrorists attacked New York." We watched the horror of that day, as all of you did. We cried. I walked around in shock for a week. I simply could not believe anyone could be that evil. And I fell in line with everyone else who so desperately wanted to rally together and stay strong, to refuse to be defeated by this insane act. I saw such beautiful support and love from all over the globe, courage from everyday Americans, and a chance to really look at our place in the world.
Then Bush gave The Speech: we were going to attack Afghanistan. And I, shattered like so many, supported him. Believed him. Trusted him.
That trust was misplaced, and it took ten months before I woke from the fog and started asking questions.
Since then, I have learned more than I ever wanted to know about the rot at the heart of the United States government. I am, despite my colorful choice of nicknames, no radical. I am not a man of paranoid delusions about 'the gubbermint" and alien crop circle Bigfoot abductions. When I first discovered the emerging truth about the Bush administration and its recycled Reaganites - many of them considered downright criminals by the world at large - I became so angry that I ripped the American flag from my antenna and snapped its mast in two.
No one likes to be lied to. And we have been. Repeatedly. What's worse, we fell for it, utterly.
In the streets, I protested the invasion of Iraq, a country that was no threat to the United States, despite the lies told to the American public - told to you and I - by the Bush administration and parroted by the bought-off, gutless "liberal" (hah! liberal, my eye!) media. For my efforts to help call attention to the truth, I have been labeled a Saddam-sympathizer, a traitor - even told I had the same mindset as the abominable, murdererous Osama bin Laden (who, by the way, despised Hussein and flatly refused to work with him, even offering before the Gulf War in 1991 to raise 100,000 soldiers to fight Hussein so that the United States would not base soldiers in Saudi Arabia).
I was even pulled over by the police for having an upside-down American flag - a universal sign of distress - on my antenna.
I have been verbally attacked, glared at with hatred, and intimidated by people, simply for expressing dissent via bumper stickers on my car. I have lost friendships over my desire to tell the truth about what's going on in America today. Even with all this, though, I won't remain silent. I love America, and I want my country back.
By now, it should be obvious to everyone not too scared to see reality that things are seriously wrong in America. People - including an American citizen! - are being held without access to lawyers, without knowing the charges against them, their Constitutional and human rights violated. Even now, the United States military plans on adding an execution chamber to its shameful detention camps in Guantanamo Bay, where the Geneva Convention is not followed and 23 detainees have attempted suicide due to execrable conditions. Over seven hundred men, mostly Arabs, have been secretly detained since 9/11, despite the fact that our government has admitted that most of these prisoners have little or no links to terrorism. Military tribunals are planned for those deemed "enemy combatants" - a conveniently vague classification - solely on the decision of the Bush administration. The misnamed Patriot Act has stripped away fundamental rights and allows secret "sneak-and-peak" break-and-enter searches, roving wiretaps, and other privacy-invading tactics reminiscent of COINTELPRO, the former government program that spied on and infiltrated "unapproved" political groups, a program that was officially banned in 1976 due to police and state abuse. Library, book purchase, and internet usage records can now be seized by the FBI on demand.
More than 50 of our collective sons and daughters in the military have died in Iraq since Bush declared "Mission Accomplished" aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln - a surreal moment, since our flight-suited Fearless Leader went AWOL in 1972 from the Texas Air National Guard, allowing others to die in Vietnam while his senatorial father pulled strings to place his barely-qualified-to-fly son ahead of thousands of worthy young men. The Iraqi people demand our troops get the hell out of their country, angrier every day at the incompetent reconstruction efforts and continued shortages of water, food, and freedoms. Our soldiers have died, and continue to die, for the lies of an administration so intermingled with oil companies that it constitutes an environmental disaster all by itself.
And I hear very little outrage.
Instead, people shrug off the obvious, lie to themselves with the help of "fair and balanced" media (here's a hint: Roger Ailes, head of FOX News, worked for Reagan), and stay focused on so-called reality shows like Survivor and CNN Headline News. People say "well, it's all a matter of opinion", even when one can slap down the official documents which prove the truth about criminal enterprises such as Iran-Contra, Operation Northwoods, and the current occupation of Iraq. More than ignorance, I see fear in these people - fear of the truth, fear to face the fact that so much of what we have been told about our government is a sham, a lie told to keep us in line and under control. I know, because I once felt that same fear.
Now I feel a different fear. We have the illusion of freedom, nothing more. To believe that the Bush administration has our best interests at heart is to enable their lies and further their agenda of "full spectrum dominance", as the administration-heavy members of the Project for the New American Century describe their ultimate goals. There was another time when citizens refused to see the encroaching darkness, instead turning their eyes to meaningless scandals and deceptive propaganda. That time was 1939 Germany, and the horror unleashed with the assistance of the deceived, compliant German populace still causes nightmares sixty years later.
America is the new pre-Poland Germany, the reincarnation of Rome circa 492 A.D., and without a massive awakening we will follow that ancient empire into the abyss of history. If we fail to hold our government accountable for its actions, we will become the next tyrannical empire, in name as well as fact. We will be responsible.
That is why I am afraid.