“You know,” my partner told me tonight, “we probably qualify as terrorists now.”
Apparently, the floor debate over the just-passed National Defense Authorization Act included, as criteria for terrorist potential, the stockpiling of more than seven days worth of food. And since my partner and I just got done spending some year-end paychecks on holiday-sale foodstuffs, we have possibly more than seven days’ worth of food in our cabinets.
Such surplus used to be considered wealth. Now it’s supposed to be considered a threat.
What the fuck is WRONG with us? Not with my partner and me, but with our nation, with our world, as a whole?
How in every hell imaginable did the “land of the free, home of the brave” allow itself to become so shackled to absurdity?
As we careen full-force into the second year of the second decade of our brave new millennium, we technocratic pioneers seem more like scared servants to our luxuries. In Europe, governments teeter on the edge of bankruptcy, slashing the salaries of their working classes in frantic efforts to keep their richest people smiling. In the Middle East, governments rape, torture and kill en mass the citizens who are fed up with dictatorial oil sheiks. In Asia, children grow up making goodies for distant consumocracies. And in the States, we have two parties tearing our nation to shreds at the behest of corporate empires who won’t be happy until they not only own the government but command its every move.
What. The. HELL?!?!
How are we BUYING this bullshit, folks? How do We The People – of whatever nation we happen to people – accept such insanity? Why is it that we are fighting one another in the streets over whether or not men should be allowed to fuck other men up the ass when our respective governments are fucking us ALL up the ass... without the love or consent implied by actual gay relationships? Why is it that this holiday season (and every holiday season for the past ten years or so) has featured people literally declaring “wars” upon one another over our methods of celebrating (or not celebrating) the holiday in question, while meanwhile the law enforcement agencies tasked with keeping us safe are gassing us, shooting us, beating our bones broken? When the hell are we going to WAKE UP, PEOPLE, and see that the real enemy is the one taking our paychecks with one hand and buying our governments with the other?
A common definition of terrorism includes "the use of force to coerce and intimidate, especially for political purposes" and "the state of fear produced by terrorism." If we accept this definition, then we have become our own terrorists, so afraid of terrorism that we perpetrate the continual act of terrorism upon ourselves and others.
Oh, Mr. Bin Ladin, how well you have succeeded.
And damn you to every conceivable hell for showing us how damned we can become.
Terrorism is alive and well, folks – not in the secluded corners of radical madrassas (although it’s certainly alive there too), but in the halls of governments and corporations who make slaves of us and let us buy the chains. Those “corporate citizens” who shit in our lands and piss in our waters and then have the audacity to act as though they are the wronged parties; the ones who sell us propaganda in the guise of news; the ones who bribe our judges, cops and lawmakers to trash OUR rights and properties in order to preserve their own – THESE are the true terrorists in our midst. They don’t need swords to cut out pay, guns to shoot our legs out from under us, bombs to blow our futures to bits. All they need is what we give them: MONEY, and the power that it brings.
And we just can’t seem to stop giving it to them.
Hell, we’ll even tear gas one another in our haste to do it.
The late (?) Mr. Bin Ladin succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. Because we LET him show us how fragile the illusions and institutions of our “freedoms” are. We choose to live in a fear we ourselves perpetrate.
Just over ten years ago, the world’s economy was surging through one of its greatest periods of prosperity. Two mortal enemies had dropped their world-endangering 50-year feud. Aside from a strange fascination with 2000-year-old prophecies, the majority of our species was enjoying the closest thing to what we rabid angel-apes accept as peace.
And then, in September 2001, "terrorist" became the Pavlovian buzzword through which any extremity is justified.
Now our own governments make preemptive prisoners of every one of us. Our politicians manage to cross party lines just long enough to make every man, woman or child on earth a potential victim of military tribunals. It used to be that only “evil empires” made people disappear into the night without trials or recourse. Now, our global entire political system is run by people who speak of “freedom” while tearing it apart right before our eyes.
And when we “Occupy”? When we assert our rights under the very documents that frame our nations? When Greeks refuse to take yet another pay cut, when Britons rebel against murderous cops, when Americans take up the rights assured to them by the Bill of Rights that all U.S. politicians must swear to uphold… well then, out come the batons and the tear gas and the plastic cuffs manufactured by the same companies that own the jails and “hire” the inmates as free labor.
But don’t worry, folks – those people are all just “terrorists.” Really. Go out and buy more shit and hope you won’t be the next one to lose your job or watch your paycheck shrink.
Did it really take just one day to change all that, or were we always so fragile all along?
This isn’t about Democrats or Republicans, Communists or Capitalists. They’re ALL doing this. China is no less exploitative of its workers than the fiercest robber baron, and the most generous corporation inflicts more misery than the greediest medieval warlord.
And yet we LET them. We SUPPORT them. All around the world, we’re gleefully stomping “witches” and “faggots” and “hippies” and “infidels” – sometimes figuratively, often literally – in an effort to show how strong we are.
But if we’re all potential terrorists in the eyes of our governments, how, really, must those governments regard us?
What kind of threat must we present to one another, that we’ll give away everything we have in order to buy thicker chains while somehow seeing them as walls instead?
How do we discard the words of our saviors to embrace the tactics of their enemies? How long will we refuse to see that ugly image in our mirrors?
And when the hell will we wake ourselves out of this nightmare where everyone’s a terrorist and no one is free?