Saying Nothing
I just finished watching “V for Vendetta†and I was struck by a thought. People in our country today no longer know how to take action against a Government that has spiraled out of their control. We have lost our ability to carry out a dialogue with the state; we have given up our voice out of fear of the social consequences of our words. We fear being labeled “un-Americanâ€, “terrorist-supportersâ€, “jihadist-loversâ€, and “troop-hatersâ€. And with that fear we are cowed into complicit silence as we watch our nation slowly spiral out of our control.
But those labels are just nonsensical pejoratives, and the people who use them expect that they will silence any meaningful opposition. They are used to isolate conflicting views from the mainstream; they are used to limit the dialogue to acceptable and invisible zones of speech. These nonsensical pejoratives have shaped the new language of political correctness. Except unlike that misguided movement of past decades, which sought that no person should ever feel offended by the words that they heard; this new political correctness seeks to ensure that the power of government should never be offended by what the people say.
Submissiveness to the will of the state though is not the way that this country was created. In 1776, John Hancock’s gigantic signature on the Declaration of Independence was a huge single finger salute to the state of their origin. Every man who put his name on that piece of paper signed his own death warrant if caught. Each one of them committed treason against the state on that fateful day because they could not stand the path that their Mother Country had taken and they could not idly take the abuse delivered upon their fellow colonists any longer.
There are many in our country that feel that the nation is spiraling out of control. And what do they do? They get permits to stand passively like cattle in obscure “free speech zonesâ€. They sit around and sing folk songs, camp out on the side of roads, and hold candle vigils, they hold up signs protesting anything and everything under the sun instead of pointing an accusatory finger at the creeping fascist elephant in the room. Yet they do nothing that forces the state to listen to them, because they fear the consequences. They fear being arrested or being labeled with a nonsensical pejorative… and they sit there with everybody else in complicit silence.
First, I would love for someone to call me a “jihadist-lover”. That would make my day.
Second, part of the problem isn’t that people are afraid of what they are going to be called. It is that people are afraid that the creeping fascist elephant in the room is going to have them thrown into a prison as a “non-combatant” for several years with no lawyer access and no trial. They want to not be forgotten by the public that they are trying to help.
Lets be honest with each other for a second here. You can call me whatever you want and I am going to laugh at you and keep doing what I am doing. You show that you are willing to lock up people that disagree with you and throw away the key, well that intimidates a bit more. And many of your granola eaters that are protesting this stuff don’t have name recognition like Cindy Sheehan. If they were locked away no one but their family would miss them.
I would not call what many attempt to do sitting in complicit silence. I would call it trying to balance our opinion with the threat of disappearing one night.
“Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.”
Henry David Thoreau, “Civil Disobedience” 1849.
The point is that those people who are attempting to protest the excesses of this government are disorganized and unfocused. They have no real leadership with which to rally around, and worry more about favorable media exposure rather than actually getting something done. And that is not the way that such actions have ever been successfully carried out. They are too comfortable to want to risk the harm that might be brought against them.
The followers of Dr. King and Mahatma Gandhi faced risk of injury and death every time they made a demonstration of civil disobedience. Despite that they changed their worlds for the better by taking that risk.
And the creeping curtailing of our rights is glacial in its progress, to the point that most do not even notice the inevitable destination that our current path is taking us down. And by the time that it becomes plainly obvious to everybody where we are going it will truly be too late to do anything about it peacefully.
“If you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance for survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.” — Winston Churchill