The Forgotten Poems

For those of you who are the slighest bit aware of what is going on in our country you know that this whole siituation with the NSA is a big deal right now. Bush is calling for a huge database of every phone call made (I think within the past year or so) for the purposes of national security. Well, as you can imagine I am outraged by this as it is an invasion of privacy. I was listening to the radio and they were interviewing people to get their responses to the recent news and one person made the comment, "It doesn't bother me; if you have nothing to hide than what do you have to be afraid of?"

But, my dear friends, it is not as simple as that, is it? I doubt that anyone who reads this particular diary, nor for that matter anyone in the whole COUNTRY, is completely 100% satisfied with the way things are run here in the States. I am completely positive that at one point or another every able-minded person has expressed some grief or distate towards our government, and I'm not just talking about our current administration. What the person's comment implies is that the government is only going to be cracking down on those people doing illegal things or talking about illegal things over the phone, and so we normal people have nothing to fear.

Except.

Except what is legal today may very well become illegal tomorrow. Today it is okay to express your anger towards government policies, but what if that were to change? What if people started getting arrested and held with no other explanation than they were enemies of the state of threats to national security when all they did was express their outrage over the Patriot Act on the phone? That is outrageous, you say, that is absurd to suggest such a thing BUT, and this is something I want you to seriously consider, doesn't the monitoring of your phone conversations make you feel just a little apprehensive to discuss your difference of opinions with the current administration? Doesn't it make you just a little bit paranoid? We humans are storehouses of paranoia are we not? So the question is: is that our government's intention? Are they trying to scare us into not talking about anything over the phone that might seem even the slighest bit, the tiniest bit, incriminating? And perhaps I am being paranoid, and if that is so I apologize for my ranting, but if I am on the money here, if you agree with me, then doesn't that mean the government is limiting our ability to free speech? I don't mean free speech as in slandering some politician or giving out death threats, I mean free speech as in expressing whether or not you think certain government policies are really healthy, are really what is best, for this country.

I don't know. It's something worth thinking about in any event.

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