I was thinking just a few minutes before I started this post about my in-progress novel, Cleansed By Fire, and thinking, just how would a society of people allow itself to be controlled by an oppressive religious leadership and how could such a leadership end up controlling two continents and part of a third. (If you aren’t reading my novel, don’t worry, this post should still make sense)
Is such a thing possible?
Sadly, I think it is possible. We think of the religiously tinged strong-arm governments of the world as being in Iran or elsewhere in the Middle East. Rarely do we look at how we ourselves have sometimes let religious interests and other very specific, very narrow interests dictate certain aspects of politics (I include people in the left-wing and the right-wing for this…certainly, some aspects of political correctness, for example, a liberal creation, are quite oppressive).
After the events of 9/11 (and my novel inadvertantly hearkens back to this with a devastating terrorist attack in a future version of New York), we allowed our government to carve away at our civil rights. We did so because it seemed to make sense. We should give the government more power to catch the bad guys because certainly it won’t get us good guys caught up in the net. But it does, sometimes by accident and sometimes on purpose. We let the USA Patriot Act get passed when it was something we, as a nation, from the left wing to the right wing, should have said, “No” to without budging an inch.
We get the government we deserve a lot of times, and if we are apathetic, we kind of deserve to get screwed.
Liberty is not merely some word. Freedom is not simply a neat little idea. These things are things that people have fought and died for, and it makes me sick that anyone would stamp on them. Most particularly, it pains me that right-wingers who claim they are so down with the Constitution would let such things happen. They like the right to bear arms, but let’s hold back on that freedom of speech. Just as the left-wingers sometimes want to wipe out all guns and want to extend free speech into areas it wasn’t meant to be.
I will simply leave you with one of the few quotes of Benjamin Franklin that I have committed to memory, and it is this:
Those who would give up Essential Liberty, to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety
I just realized that I haven’t said something to you that sorely needs to be said. You, Deac (and Miz Pink as well) are CONSISTENTLY BADASS.
That’s all.
Damn! That’s some of the highest praise I’ve gotten in a long time.
😀
Oh goodness. You said the word. “Political correctness.” While I totally feel the entire message of this post, I oppose PC with a passion. How friggin oppressive!
It’s like rules of etiquette and getting bashed for eating your salad with the wrong fork. Talk about control.
We live in an age where everybody is so easily offended. I happen to prefer “straight forward” folks because you always know where you stand – even when you don’t necessarily like it.
Okay, I almost took a big step onto a soap box and totally off-topic, but I turned away just in time. lol
Ah, don’t worry…sometimes a soap box moment or off-topic tangent can make the comments FAR more entertaining. I don’t mind.
PC shit is fine up to a point, but it pisses me off something fierce at times. I didn’t mind so much when handicapped because disabled…but when people tried to dress it up as “differently abled” I wanted to take the folks responible out behind a shed and differently able their faces. 😉
Now, you just knew I was gonna see all this in my own unique way. Not to sound like a contrarian, which I’m not, I like to say that I’m probably more tolerant of PC behavior than most.
That we are perhaps overly sensitive to the feelings, culture, history, experience, lifestyle, race, disability, sect, sex, politics, and sexual orientation of others, is not necessarily a bad thing.
I believe that it signals that we, as a nation, are becoming more tolerant of the differences in our midst, and we’re being ultra-careful to send that message to those groups, so as not to offend.
Sure the pendulum swung too far in the direction of tolerance, but that’s because it had swung so far to the other side (intolerance) to begin with.
Soon, the pendulum will find its balance, and come to rest some where between the two extremes. It’s just the way things adjust themselves. It’s how we find our balance, our center. The extremes allow us to know just how far we’ve gone in either direction, and help us locate a balance, a center.
Without the extremes, it’s hard to know where the center resides.
Namaste
I don’t think you’re being contrarian, but I am not so confident we will find the center. Problem is that generally speaking, we humans seems to roll out extremes to deal with perceived problems. 😉
I’ve seen so many people who turn perfectly innocent comments into a slight against an entire group; they are LOOKING in many cases to find a reason to get mad, and so they will always find one.
I mean, there are plenty of womyn (because being feminist isn’t enough, and having “man” in the word “woman” is oppressive) keep harping on about how “history” is a sexist term because “his” is in the word, and so they say “herstory.” That’s the kind of thing that gets people angry, and sometimes makes them WANT to start going back to less-PC ways or even intolerant ways as a backlash.