Recently, I've been reading a very interesting book called "The People Themselves" by Larry Kramer.
What really hooked me on this book are the first three pages of the introduction. The author lists a few different scenarios from the late 1700's - court cases and congressional decisions that directly impacted the Constitutional rights of the citizens of the United States. The hook is in the reaction to those decisions by the citizenry and how closely they held the concepts and appreciated the frail nature of their independence.
One paragraph sums it up nicely:
In these and countless similar scenes, Americans of the founding era reveal how they understood their role in popular government in ways that we, who take so much for granted, do not. The United States was then the only country in the world with a government founded explicitly on the consent of its people, given in a distinct and identifiable act, and the people who gave that consent were intensely, profoundly conscious of the fact. And proud. This pride, this awareness of the fragility and importance of their venture in popular government, informed everything the Founding generation did. It was, as Gordon Wood has said, "the deeply felt meaning of the Revolution."
At my place of employment, I'm surrounded by the enemy (politically) for the most part. On the rare occasions we discuss politics, it saddens me that they rationalize the potential loss of their guaranteed rights as citizens as a necessary evil in this day and age. They have no desire to question their government's actions, and they figure they have nothing to hide, so the right to privacy can be breached a bit. All in the name of fighting terrorism.
What is wrong with these people?