Gordo's Brain

I want off. NOW! I need to throw up.

Classes were cancelled at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania due to recycling last Wednesday. Sort of. It had more to do with the colour of the skin of the man doing the recycling and how he was doing it. You see, he was putting it at the curb. Beside his garbage cans. Shocking, isn’t it?

It should be shocking: an ROTC student reported a man of “Middle Eastern” descent, driving a car with out of state plates had placed a box beside the trash cans and driven off. The suspected terrorist, English Professor Kazim Ali continues:

Because of my recycling, the bomb squad came, then the state police. Because of my recycling, buildings were evacuated, classes were canceled, the campus was closed. No. Not because of my recycling. Because of my dark body. No. Not even that. Because of his fear. Because of the way he saw me. Because of the culture of fear, mistrust, hatred and suspicion that is carefully cultivated in the media, by the government, by people who claim to want to keep us “safe.”

…

One of my colleagues was in the gathering crowd, trying to figure out what had happened. She heard my description — a Middle Eastern man driving a white Beetle with out of state plates — and knew immediately they were talking about me and realized that the box must have been manuscripts I was discarding. She approached them and told them I was a professor on the faculty there. Immediately the campus police officer said, “What country is he from?”

“What country is he from?!” she yelled, indignant.

“Ma’am, you are associated with the suspect. You need to step away and lower your voice,” he told her.

When does the next Joseph McCarthy show his face? Will there be hearings and loyalty tests? Will there be blacklists? Strike that, there already are. What happened to the “kinder and gentler nation” that George Bush Sr. promised? His duty-shirking, hard-drinking idiot son has flushed it down the toilet, that’s what!

Come on, people! Wake up! Is this really what you want your country to be? Do you want to be reviled by the world simply because of where you come from? Don’t you want to live in a civil country that takes care of it’s people and treats it’s visitors with respect and dignity? Yes, the September 11 attack was a horrendous tragedy. Do you honestly think that any of the dead would like what’s become of their country in their names? Honestly?

The reality is this: you’re almost universally despised. Those who don’t despise you, fear you. Except the British, they’re taking things to a further extreme than you are. Your government is shredding your Constitutional rights on a daily basis. They’re spying on you. They’re reading your email and listening to your telephone calls. Your President exempts himself from every law that he signs that might interfere with his agenda. Don’t you see the handbasket? Can’t you feel the heat yet?

This truly chilling essay was published in The Guardian this morning:

Fascist America, in 10 easy steps:

1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy
2. Create a gulag
3. Develop a thug caste
4. Set up an internal surveillance system
5. Harass citizens’ groups
6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release
7. Target key individuals
8. Control the press
9. Dissent equals treason
10. Suspend the rule of law

It is my argument that, beneath our very noses, George Bush and his administration are using time-tested tactics to close down an open society. It is time for us to be willing to think the unthinkable – as the author and political journalist Joe Conason, has put it, that it can happen here. And that we are further along than we realise.

The author, Naomi Wolfe, says they’re all done and in place. You need to do something to stop this. For starters: stop taking it from behind and start shouting. Wolfe says it better than I can:

Right now, only a handful of patriots are trying to hold back the tide of tyranny for the rest of us – staff at the Center for Constitutional Rights, who faced death threats for representing the detainees yet persisted all the way to the Supreme Court; activists at the American Civil Liberties Union; and prominent conservatives trying to roll back the corrosive new laws, under the banner of a new group called the American Freedom Agenda. This small, disparate collection of people needs everybody’s help, including that of Europeans and others internationally who are willing to put pressure on the administration because they can see what a US unrestrained by real democracy at home can mean for the rest of the world.

Via Bruce Schneier and Threat Level.

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