Okay folks, it's late at night, I'm up way past my bedtime, but feel a serious need to rant so I finally can sleep without first consuming mass quantities of rum.
My rant comes from listening/reading/hearing people for three days now debate whether our preznit broke the law wiretapping American citizens without even the fig leaf of non-protection the FISA provides.
My rant comes from everyone; I mean EVERYONE, somewhere in their talking points include the statement to the effect "Of Course I Care About Combating Terrorism."
Well Folks, at the risk of having all of wingnuttia flame me, I want to say right now, for the record, I DON'T FUCKING CARE ABOUT COMBATTING TERRORISM."
So please continue reading below the fold, if you dare.
IMHO, the very thing terrorists care about is making people AFRAID. Terrorists care about disrupting lives, societies, governments, and the entire world.
They want people to be cowering in a closet, trembling in fear, worried that at any moment an airplane will crash into their office building and kill every one inside.
The terrorists want people to be afraid that at any moment a nuclear bomb built out of scrap metal and stolen plutonium will detonate under their car leaving for work one morning.
The terrorists want people to be afraid that their water supply will be deliberately contaminated with industrial-grade fluorides, causing everyone who allows one drop to cross their lips suddenly start chanting Arabic and bowing to Mecca five times daily. Where-ever the hell Mecca is anyway.
And the terrorists want people to be afraid that a form of Ebola deliberately mutated in stolen high-school biology class beakers will be let loose upon an unsuspecting world killing 90% of all humanity and leaving only scarred zombie brain dead mutants to eat the few remaining normal people attempting to rebuild society as we once knew it.
Folks:
I REFUSE TO BE SCARED OF TERRORISTS!
I Refuse to cower in fear, living my life looking over my shoulder, worried that some <fill in the blank> IS GOING TO KILL ME AND 100,000,000 other people to promote their cause of <fill in the blank>.
I REFUSE TO BE SCARED OF TERRORISTS!
I'm not in a particular hurry to die, but I also do not fear death. It's something that happens to all of us, one birth = one death. And when I go, it truly does not matter to me if 100,000,000 other people go at the exact same instance. I suspect I'll be too busy doing whatever it is that dead people do when they die to notice the other 100,000,000.
I REFUSE TO BE SCARED OF TERRORISTS!
There are things that frighten me.
I am scared of being spied upon by my government.
I am scared of neighbors starting whispering campaigns against me to gain revenge over some slight.
I am scared of being hauled away from my bed in the middle of the night with no one in my family knowing what happened to me.
I am scared of jack-boot thugs applying electrodes to my testicles until I admit to hating small children, poisoning dogs, and killing JFK.
And I AM SO FED-UP WITH PEOPLE ATTEMPTING TO JUSTIFY ANY REASON for eroding the civil liberties that have always made our country a little better place to live than just about anywhere else in this tired old world.
And to the trolls out there - and you know who you are - I say: I grew up in New York City, watched the world trade centers built, and walked through them many times. Back in the 1970's, 1980's, and 1990's I listened ad nauseum to people who had never been to New York City talk about how much they hated that city and wished it would just wash away.
And now I listen to the same types of people, even some of the same people, use 9/11 as their excuse for letting our country become a tin-pot right-wing dictatorship with a sorry-ass cowardly two-bit dimwit as head dictator-in-chief.
To you people trolling this diary, I say "Fuck You."
To the wingnuts out there who are now claiming "Civil liberties don't matter if you are dead," I say: civil liberties matter until you're dead. Civil liberties come down to defining FREEDOM, and FREEDOM is what this nation used to stand for. Millions of people have died in the course of history to preserve FREEDOM. In fact, this nation used to be proud of how many people we've killed over the course of our history preserving FREEDOM.
To everyone else I say: stop using the stock platitude "Of Course I Care About Combating Terrorism."
I don't care enough about terrorism to let my civil liberties walked over by jack-booted thugs wearing a government-issued uniform claiming they have to arrest me and torture me in order to keep me safe from terrorists.
Folks, the jack-booted thugs with government-issued uniforms are the face of the real terrorists.
Their masters, starting with the sorry-ass cowardly two-bit dimwit as head dictator-in-chief, are the people who want to keep us afraid, so they can continue to claim the god-given right to do as they damn well please.
< / rant > and a good night to all.