Huxley, Orwell, or Jefferson?

          I get really depressed sometimes. So depressed, I can’t get out of bed. I think of the country I grew up in and what it has become.  Now, of course the country I grew up in was nothing like the country that my father grew up in, or his father, or his father’s father. It has been changing. It has been getting worse. It is depressing to think that what is supposed to be the shining example of liberty to the world is a police state. Why is it that a person can walk down the street with an open beer in his hand in a Muslim country, but cannot in America? Where you have to get the governments permission to marry whomever you choose? Where you have to get a prescription from a doctor to get antibiotics, or any medicine; where real medicine is illegal. Is this liberty?

            We live in a country where more people are concerned about what insanity is going to happen next on “Real Housewives” or who is going to win the playoffs. However, if you ask the average citizen who the Secretary of State is, or who their representatives in congress are, they couldn’t tell you. As long as they have their beer and ballgame, they don’t care.

Aldous Huxley, author of “Brave New World” would be utter shocked to see how accurately he got it. His was a world of total pleasure and no rights. Babies were not carried by mothers, as a matter of fact; mother and father were pornographic ideas. Babies were created in a test tube. They were genetically bred to serve a purpose in society. Their development was stinted to make them less intelligent. Some were bred to be the leaders, the best and brightest. All were taught from a young age that everyone belonged to everyone else. There was no such thing as marriage the thought of being committed to one person was disgusting to them.  They all had a drug called soma to keep them happy. Happiness was literally forced on everyone. Consumerism was critical. No game could be simple. It had to have as many appliances as it could, which required buying more things. This was the way of it. The masses were totally controlled and manipulated.

            We are told that Al Qaeda is a terrorist group who despise Americans because we are Americans. We are scared into thinking they are everywhere and that only the government can save us from them.  They passed the Patriot Act overnight after the World Trade Center was attacked. Interesting no one asked how they could get such a huge and destructive bill written that fast.  This law allows the government to spy on us without warrants. It allows the government to look at our bank accounts and actually makes it illegal for the bank to tell you they did, again without warrants. It allows the government to ransack your house without a warrant and without your knowledge. This is all for our safety, and we accept it. The government puts up Red Light Cameras to make us safer from people who run red lights. Don’t worry that your right to privacy is invaded by such cameras. “Every day in El Paso; DWI, no refusal” is put up as a message on the signs on the highways. It means that when you are pulled over, they can take your blood without your permission, they need only think you might have been drinking. But we accept it for our safety. They set up inspection points randomly all over town and interrogate everyone. We accept it for our safety.  They can spy on us, where we go, what we say, just by tracking our cell phones, without a warrant. But it’s for our safety. We are at a perpetual state of war “The War on Terror” it is called. Hunting down those who would do us harm. In prosecuting this war, we kill many innocent men, women, and children. We invade their country and subject them to the worst kind of control and intimidation. Yet, it is for our safety. Are we really to believe that these people don’t mind? Do we really think they don’t deserve better? Can we really expect them to hold their child whose head was blown off and then they will just roll over and accept it? How would we feel? Would we not become the enemy of those who killed our child?

            George Orwell wrote the book “1984”. In this book, people are subject to spying, the children are even made to inform the government of their parent’s behavior. They are spied on in their houses. The news is propaganda. History is wiped out and rewritten to make the facts of today consistent. They are at a perpetual state of war. It is a complete Police State.

            Our country is becoming the worst of both of those dystopian worlds and people don’t even know it. They go on accepting the edicts from on high as gospel, never to question anything any government agency does. We go on with our lives, as long as they don’t take away our beer and ballgame.

            Our Founding Fathers had several different ideas on how this country should be. There were those who believed that we should have a strong federal government, essentially replacing one dictator -- the King of England -- with another.  There were also those who believed our country should have a very small and powerless federal government. Thomas Jefferson is the most well known of this group.  He has said many great things, such as “Experience hath shown, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny” and “My reading of history convinces me that most bad government results from too much government.” He knew what would happen if a government was unchecked.

What would our country look like today if we followed his wisdom? If the past generations had paid attention to what the government was doing and how it violated their rights? Would we have 25% of the world’s prison population? Would we have a general government that has such police agencies as the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that has bought over 1.6 billion rounds of ammunition, 2700 armored vehicles and 7000 machine guns? DHS does not wage foreign wars. This equipment is meant to be used on us. Would we have the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) who terrorizes neighborhoods looking for drugs? There have been many, many reports of them assaulting the wrong house, killing people’s dogs, falsely imprisoning people. Even killing innocent people because they thought they had a weapon. Yet we accept it. We don’t care, as long as we have our beer and ballgame.

We live in the insanity where in 1965 Barry Goldwater was called a racist because he opposed the Civil Rights Act. The reality was the he was not a racist, he opposed the government telling people what they had to do with their own property. We are told that we have always been the good guys and that we still are.

            We are told that Muslims call us “the Great Satan” because of our society. The truth is, we are called that because we helped a murderous tyrant into power in 1953. Our CIA trained his goon squads who terrorized the people for almost 30 years. When they revolted against this madman and us, we said it was because they were evil. They chose liberty. When our soldiers who were occupying Iraq were being attacked, we called those attackers terrorists, they called themselves Freedom Fighters. 

            Imagine living in a world where there was no war, where people could make decisions for themselves and succeed or fail as a result, where no one could tell anyone else what to do, that people lived their own lives. Where justice really was blind and where there had to be a victim in order for there to be a crime. This was Jefferson’s vision. Could we ever get back? Not as long as people only care about their beer and ballgame.