On Friday, the American people lost the freedoms of the fourth amendment to the Constitution, with the House of Representatives voting to approve the FISA Amendments Act. The Senate will vote on whether to confirm the conference bill sometime this week, and then President Bush will sign the act into law.
The FISA Amendments Act allows the President of the United States, through the Attorney General of the United States, to electronically spy on and physically search any person or home in the United States of America, without a search warrant or need to prove any suspicion of wrongdoing. The law also provides retroactive immunity to telecommunications corporations that broke the law by handing over private information about the personal communications of millions of Americans to George W. Bush.
Have you not heard about the passage of the FISA Amendments Act until now? If you haven’t, then you’re part of the problem.
I don’t care if you take offense. If you’ve been ignorant about the effort to take away a vital part of the Bill of Rights, it’s because you’ve been choosing not to pay attention.
Unfortunately, you’re not alone. Most Americans care more about movie stars, music videos and sales at the shopping mall than they care about freedom. Most Americans care more about baseball than they care about the Bill of Rights.
I’m not making this up. The sad facts are recorded in Google Trends, which shows statistics about the relative numbers of phrases people search for.
The charts you see here are for two keyword search comparisons I did tonight: One for “warrantless wiretapping” and “red sox”, and another for “fisa amendments act” and “red sox”.
The charts show the trend in the number of searches for these key phrases so far in 2008, from January 1st onward. You’ll have no trouble seeing the rise and fall of searches for the Red Sox baseball team. They’re the lines in red.
You’ll have a great deal of trouble finding the trends in the searches for information about the FISA Amendments Act or warrantless wiretapping. They’re in blue, and when it comes to Google keyword searches, the number of searches for information about these subjects is so small that it doesn’t show up at all.
The mainstream news media recognized by Google News did only barely better. See those blue lines at the bottoms of the “News reference volume” charts? That’s the number of articles the mainstream news media wrote about “warrantless wiretapping” and the “fisa amendments act” this year, in comparison to how much they wrote about the Red Sox. It’s hardly even a smudge on these graphs.
So, who is to blame for the devastation of the Bill of Rights wrought by the FISA Amendments Act? Yes, it’s Congress, who actually voted on the bill. But, that’s just the end result. Fundamentally, the problem is that the American people don’t care enough about what their own government is doing to even take the simple step of doing a Google keyword search for the name of the legislation that will take away their rights to live in peace and privacy.
I accuse the American people.
Except for a tiny minority, the American people do not give a damn about freedom. Give them plenty of baseball to watch, and they’ll be happy as the Bill of Rights is dismantled piece by piece.
The American people have proven themselves to be ignorant, lazy and selfish.
I am ashamed of what the United States of America has become.
But sometimes I feel just as worthless as people who don’t contact their legislators. Sure, I wrote David Price of NC about HR 6304, but he was going to vote against it anyway. He’s that way; we’re in a very blue congressional district. My two NC Senators, Burr and Dole, always go in the other direction, so I feel just as silly and worthless when I write to them. I can just hear their staffers snorting and chuckling as they read my e-mails. I’m not going to stop writing, but still, sometimes it feels pointless.
Hey Bob, welcome to the “new America” of corporate ownership, non-functionality and complete lack of accountability. Congress won’t impeach Bush because they too are complicit in all that’s transpired over the last 8 years. The courts are stacked with neocons (or at least right wingers), so it’s not likely that anything will change for the better any time soon. Protesting didn’t work, writing our Congress people doesn’t seem to work, voting in new people didn’t work (just look at Pelosi) and the country is going down the tubes. Short of a revolution (or everyone declining to pay their taxes), Washington will pretty much ignore the citizens in favor of the big money corporations.