Thank you, thank you, thank you for saying what've I've been scared to say. I was afraid of being called selfish and chauvinist and racist.
I just don't give a shit about marginal issues like indefinite detention, issues that, let's face it, don't really affect people like me -- white middle class people. When the government gobbles up more power at the expense of individual liberties and constitutional protections, the people who tend to suffer are the marginalized: the poor, people of color -- in this case, Muslims.
And although American Muslims are a fast growing segment of the population, there just aren't that many of them, not compared to middle class white Americans like me, who care about jobs and health care, not whether or not we'll get rounded up and detained and stuck in a cell, because we won't be. I mean, after 9-11, how many middle class white people were rounded up? How many were tortured? Just about all of them were Muslim or people thought to be Muslim, and their being treated that way, although it sort of sucked and all, didn't have any impact on the bread and butter issues that real Americans care about.
Likewise with drone attacks. At a time when I'm having trouble putting food on my family, I'm weary of Paulbots like Glenn Greenwald fretting over the so-called slaughter of Muslims. Yes, many of the victims are innocent and many are children, but they certainly are not good Jesus-fearing folk like we have here in the heartland. They're not even American. Don't get me wrong: I don't like that babies are getting incinerated for no good reason, but I'm not going to mourn them, not when driving around here in what the civil liberties fetishists like to call Fly Over Land, I see so many foreclosed homes.
Another hard truth: we can't focus on everything at once. We need to prioritize. I mean, we can't focus on scaling back the hugely expensive war machine at the same time we're trying to find money for real programs that could help real Americans. As far as I'm concerned, the United States should do what it wants -- spare no expense and violate every amendment in the Bill of Rights -- in prosecuting the Great War on Terror, just as long as it also helps me make sure my middle class white children have the same kind of life I had, up until 2001 or so.
Anyway, I'd like to extend my heartfelt thanks to my fellow middle class white American for saying what needed to be said. He's made it safe for the silent majority to come forward and say, I don't give a shit about anybody but me and people who look like me.