“There are those that tell us we are losing our rights. When I look back on my 52(OMG!!!!) years, I feel as free now as I ever did. Could someone tell me, specifically and without the use of rhetoric, what rights I have lost that make me less free? It's important to remember that we can't be truly, completely free in the literal definition of the word, and still be a civilized society.â€
For what its worth, there is no really losing of rights per se, there is a restriction of rights and we have now come full circle of the witch hunts of the McCarthy era with political correctness. The patriot act aside (which is not as bad as what other presidents have come up with), the real issue is;
1 – how people perceive freedoms and rights
2 – what we have to deal with in exercising our rights
First what I mean is that many people don’t understand what rights we have and they look at today’s horrible world and think for example “well I guess to be safer, there should be restrictions or maybe elimination of the second amendment, bad people only have guns†which leads to the what you can understand is a bad, very bad thing. We have twisted around the idea that it is because of our rights, we have these problems today. We lack the education of people to understand that there is an interconnection between all the rights and our freedoms. In this case, I would fault public schools and parents for this.
The second thing is true restrictions of rights that happen through coercion, castigation and even oppressive violence when we exercise our freedoms which easily explained by saying two words – political correctness.
One illustration comes to mind Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), and their efforts to force people to shut up about their opposition (in one case CAIR is supporting suing the people who reported the Muslims that were kicked off the airlines – this is intimidation and should be looked at by the justice department) and if we say something about the terrorist being Muslim (you see this less in the news everyday) or try to make things equal like no government sponsored religion in schools (which we now have an exclusive Muslim school in NYC) we hear this complaining from groups like CAIR about how racist we are.
In the 40’s, 50’s, 60’s and even in the 80’s we never had to worry about this stuff, those times we tolerated a lot more criticism of our selves and our ethnic groups and had an more open expression of our feelings without fear of having group like CAIR or the NAACP sue us or being fired because some self appointed civil right leader is complaining.
Now if a kid (preschool) hugs a teacher, they are now sexual predators or if you use the ‘n’ word (God I can’t stand writing that) and you are not the right color, sorry I mean even the right tone of color, you are a racist – get that scarlet letter R out and pin it to your shirt. The symbolism of things matters more than the rights, look at the editing or removing of books because of some negative racial tones or deeming rhetoric – this is a standard set not by society but by an individual who may be offended (over in England they are pulling books off the shelf that were written 60 years ago because someone complained about the word Monkey). We also see this in the rhetoric of the invaders and people who support them, you are racist because you don’t want them to come here through an open border or you are racist because you support the present immigration laws. In the 50’s the question was “are you now or have you ever been a member of the communist party?†has changed to “are you now or have you ever thought of nasty things about (fill in the blank) people?†and judged accordingly.
I must add something here, it is puzzling to me to hear the ACLU go after a school, city or what ever for the ten commandments, praying at a commencement or some student saying that he believes in God or Jesus and the Christians tolerate this but here we have had foot baths installed in schools, airports and buildings, pray time in schools and government offices and now a Muslim only school, I want to know where are the Christians, their churches and the highly paid preachers on this?
Why are they not organizing and fighting this apparent assault on the religious freedoms?
Maybe this should be a wakeup call before it is too late.
There is a lot more I can write but I hope you get the point.
