That old boiling frogs metaphor has never been so apt. The slow, steady and relentless erosion of civil rights, political sanity and social justice never ceases. It's alarming to me that even those who actually care about such matters are so often unconcerned because it's been going on for so long. Nothing new about it. Why get so freaked out? We've apparently been lulled into acquiescence and apathy by the steady downpour of hateful rightwing bullshit to the point where we no longer notice it's raining. Why so shocked, many have asked in the wake of the NSA revelations. One doesn't have to be shocked to object. You don't have to be surprised to be pissed. It doesn't take an epiphany to realize how harshly we've all been screwed.
Still, some shrug, yawn and say, 'whatcha gonna do?' Others glom onto the latest 'good news' (which may or may not actually be good news) and offer it as proof that things aren't so bad. Things are pretty bad. Those who oppose The Powers That Be (antiwar activists, OWS activists, feminists, eco-activists, peaceniks) are being labeled terrorists. If that's not setting off alarms for you, you're not paying attention.
Our hard won and heretofore sanctified constitutional rights are being stripped from us one by one. LaFeminista provides a brief but worthy summary of some of the highlights, here.
Click on her links and have a read (if you haven't already), I highly recommend it. Smart cookie, that LF.
SCOTUS, the nest of raging assholes who gave us 8 years of Bush/Cheney keeps screwing us in egregious ways (apologies to any among them who are innocent). From the crowning of King Bush to Citizens United, loss of the 5th Amendment right to remain silent and now the gutting of the Voting Rights Act. Civil rights icon Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) said of the latter:
“These men that voted to strip the Voting Rights Act of its power, they never stood in unmovable lines,” Lewis told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell. “They never had to pass a so-called literacy test. It took us almost 100 years to get where we are today. So will it take another 100 years to fix it, to change it?”
100 years of progress gone in the blink of an eye. And that's just SCOTUS, just one of the many fronts on which we are under serious attack. Add to that ALEC, Corporate Lobbyists, FISA, NSA, The USA 'Patriot' Act, Republican skullduggery, Democratic enabling and the shameful corruption in our government, and it begins to amount to a real problem.
The middle class is being wiped out, the poor deprived of the last vestiges of an already tattered and inadequate safety net, public education is being destroyed, the commons privatized, medicine profitized and our young condemned to a world of debt slavery, and ecological, political and social chaos.
But a lot of people look around, see the trains running on time and say, 'what's the big deal?'
What's the big deal indeed.
History informs, but you have to look.
What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security.
WARNING: This link leads to some unpleasant (albeit pertinent) history.
Slip sliding away.
Boy, we're slip sliding away.