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7/29/2008
Burri: Boiling the frog of civil liberties
Wanna boil a frog? Put it in the pot, then turn the water up, little by little. It'll never notice until it's too late.
The frog. A slightly disturbing metaphor for another metaphor: the slippery slope. A fun (albeit Kucinich-like) letter in my local newspaper (not online, unfortunately) invoked it.
The writer is the frog. Three guesses who's turning the water up.
The heat looked like "evidence of WMDs," the Patriot Act…the beyond-Constitution site of Gitmo, torture…the under-the-radar presidential work arounds [sic], just to start. The hands turning up the temperature reside at the end of W's arms… She blames herself, too, but only to the extent that she wasn't paying attention before. Her solution: impeachment. For a start.
More power to her.
Your average-to-active Lefty won’t believe this, but civil rights are extremely important to conservatives. Individual rights.
There was a good deal of conservative concern over the Patriot Act and expanded wiretapping powers, back when they were first being debated and beyond. At the time, I wrote:
It should trouble all of us if there is no small-government-conservative wrinkling-of-the-brow, at least, over the Feds using the monumental power of government to spy on U.S. civilians, no matter what the rationale.
…as a conservative, I consider it my sacred duty to distrust the government and everything it does, no matter who is currently in power. The heat rises slowly. We get used to that, and it goes up a little more.
Every new thing becomes, with the sureness of time, the new baseline. The new what-we’re-used-to-now. And then we come to the next thing, and before you know it, we’ve got secret service agents hiding under our bedroom windows.
That's good, conservative distrust of government. Distrust that liberals share, it seems to me, only when a Republican is president.
I admit I’m not immune to that kind of partisanship, but: I and other conservatives did and do express concern over the NSA wiretapping program. Where are our liberal friends when the civil liberties at hand are political speech? Private property rights?
There’s a very serious movement underway to restrict political speech in this country: proponents want limits, restrictions, regulations on anyone who tries to disseminate a political message beyond the range of his or her own voice.
Government interference in private property is rampant, from pier regulations to zoning decisions to eminent domain to the smoking ban.
The “Fairness Doctrine” is a never-quite-dead proposal to let the federal government regulate programming on radio and TV stations.
And the heat goes up a little more.
Hey, you might hate conservative talk radio. You might despise the liberal bent of mainstream TV media. You might think smoking is the Devil’s own invention and campaign contributions – direct or indirect – are exactly the same as bribes.
Still, you can’t deny: these are all examples of government encroachment on what we can do. On what we can say. Instead of just going out and doing it, or saying it, we have to first wonder what a government bureaucrat at a desk in Madison or D.C. might think about it. How they might rule.
And a few years from now, we’ll be used to it. And the heat goes up a little more.
I’m very glad people like that letter-writer are concerned about our civil liberties. I am, too, and I’ll do my best not to let partisan fervor interfere with my concern.
It would be great if the other side would do the same.
Lance Burri is a contributor to the Badger Blog Alliance and occasionally blogs at his own site as well.
COMMENTS
emily matthews (Tue Jul 29 14:17:04 2008)
I agree. The silence of both parties is deafening when it comes to agriculture. Both support NAIS, a scheme to keep govt tabs on MY animals; it's neither about "food safety" nor "animal welfare"--email me at meg11851@yahoo.com if you have questions. Both parties are deeply involved in the Monsanto-govt alliance, which, if Monsanto gets its way, will lead to total control of the world's food supply. (Terminator genes, patented seeds, etc. How can you patent LIFE--I thought GOD created it! And don't nitpick over my use of the word "God"--it has nothing to do w-the issue at stake.) Monsanto already took a Canadian farmer to court, and forced him to destroy his non-GMO, specially developed, seed wheat.
And somehow, a part of the "peace process" or whatever you call that mess in Iraq, was a requirement that the local farmers there hand over their seed, which had been developed for thousands of years--they are now to be REQUIRED to use Monasnto's GMO seeds!
Same for all the grants to help developing nations "improve" their agriculture--grants to help them buy toxic chemicals, and GMO seeds? How about just helping them dig irrigation ditches, or teaching them better practices, such as mulching?
GMOs have never been adequately tested, are known to kill beneficial insects, cause tumors, etc. in lab animals, and they're being planted all over the place, their pollen corrupting the traditional crops.
Nobody political talks about these really important issues, because they're hoping people will stick to party politics. Food is bigger than party politics, and it's time people woke up to how they're truly being cooked.
emily matthews (Tue Jul 29 14:34:35 2008)
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