Ideas and thoughts are like people.
If a person sits around day in and day out eating Oreo cookies and drinking RC Cola, expends as little energy as possible physically shuffling from ever-close La-Z-Boy and big, AC-cooled car and spends hours upon hours listening or watching the opinions of others, then the brain, like one's muscles, begins to atrophy.
Well, atrophy might not be the right word; the brain begins to evolve into a Venus Fly-trap like specimen: any ideas that are fed it from the given "talking head" leach out reason and in their stead leave a gooey mass of "someone else's rhetoric;" rhetoric which has been crafted, analyzed by marketers and focus-groups and presented with as much emotion and mindlessness to guarantee reaction from the masses.
As was the first monkey to stand up on his two legs and reach for an apple a bit higher in the tree was ridiculed by the other slow-to-evolve, less brave monkeys, so too are progressive and original thinkers persecuted and ridiculed in the post-GOP, "dumb-down America" experiment: commenced on January 2o, 1981 and still in progress.
A Corporation is a Person and a Person is a Country
And so we have it, the greatest run against our individual rights and freedoms, the right granted by the hyperactive US Supreme Court in its decision to permit Corporations to pump millions of dollars into political candidates of their making, a stomach wound from which few--and no Constitutions--can survive empties us our democracy of vitality and a future.
Now, the GOP and the radical, neo-fascist right are pressing to have individual criminals, American citizens with sympathies for the cause of our enemy, denied their Miranda Rights.
In the same way that a corporation cannot be confused for having the same rights and privileges as a person, so too a person cannot be held to represent an entire nation. Especially, if that person is a US citizen. Timothy McVeigh's "American-ness" was never questioned. Many in the Teabag Party probably consider him a patriot; a bit radical but, he was a man devoted to a cause they believe: trying to save America from the Big Brother "federal government."
Faisal Shahzad, a name which sounds scary and foreboding, is a US citizen. Never mind, where he was originally from; the color of his skin, lacking of pure-bred, small-town America breeding of a Timothy McVeigh, he is entitled to all the rights of the US legal system. End of discussion.
Yet, because of that name and those eyes hidden by a seemingly permanent shadow, one in which he and all Pakistanis are undoubtedly plotting the destruction of the US, people, those same ones who support the Teabag nuts, W, think that we were victorious in Iraq and who question Obama's "American-ness," want this man to be tried as a war criminal.
Even the former-maverick (yet, he swears he never called himself that) John McCain, a man so hungry for power he has completely tilled the soil of what had been an honorable record in the Senate so he could plant the seeds of his mind-numbing, knee-jerk reactionary (and finally) near fascist policies just so he can hold onto that wonderful view of the Washington Monument, staggers about like a scarecrow mumbling in a recent ad: "build the fence, dang it."
Again, my dear friends, the right is wrong and what we are witnessing thanks to their ever abuse of that word is a tidal wave-like movement in the English language: the word "right" will very soon not be able to be used to express "correctness" but will actually be used to express "wrong-ness." Thank you, GOPCONers.
Flash Paper
The right is playing with fire. Living in a nation whose sole and most powerful tool for uniting the unevolved masses is xenophobic rantings at the drop of the shapka, if we continue to go down this road of anti-immigrant rhetoric than it will very, very quickly become one that does not stop with the immigrants. Very quickly it will start to engulf all Americans; white, black and brown: how many of us after a nice day at the beach just may fall prey to the over-zealousness of a local cop?
"Papers."
"What? Are you kidding me? Man, I was playing Little League right around the corner from here when you weren't even born yet."
"Sir, please step out of the car."
"What?!"...and the rest becomes a blurb in the local paper.
Sounds ridiculous and far-fetched? Not so.
So, before we sit about and facebook away about how we are Americans and we demand that immigrants have their papers and we post cute little neo-fascist "Bill's of Anti-Immigrant Rights", exercise the brain we have been given and think; imagine; go a few steps beyond the cool-sounding rhetoric and venom that regularly embodies every single minute that one of the right's talking heads speaks, and take yourself to that place where the 22-year old cop with barely a high school education is standing before you with a gun on his hip and demanding to see YOUR papers.
It can and will happen. Keep stoking the coals.
