Overcoming Fear and Standing up to Violence.

Most people seem to get that Bush’s fear tactics are being used to manipulate the American people into willingly giving him the power to usurp our civil and Constitutional rights. Whenever things get hot for Bush the message boards on Maryland’s interstate highways light up with the message, “REPORT SUSPICIOUS ACTIVITY CALL 800-942-TIPS.”

A lot of people who can see through this bullshit get nervous about being rounded up and put in detention centers somewhere down the road. Haliburton has been contracted to build them and I think it is safe to assume that they either have built them or are building them. It is reasonable to believe that these detention centers are intended to be used. It is also reasonable to believe that these centers are being built to intimidate those of us who see through the fear mongering by making us as afraid of Bush as other people seem to be afraid of “Terrorists.” (Terrorism is a tactic, not an ideology, a sect, or a racial group.)

Many discussions on Crooks&Liars that get into the possibility of suddenly becoming a police state and the government rounding up dissenters or all the Democrat Party members sooner than later have people saying they will “take as many” people who come to get them as they can.

I want to address the logic of this. Or maybe I want to point out the illogic of this.

It is our duty to make sure it never comes to that. How? By making sure we are never silent. Evil works best with tacit consent. The kind of tacit consent the Congress gave Bush after 9/11.

Evil, real evil is about power. Power over us to make us do its bidding and to sit quietly in fear or better yet disinterest while others are wronged.

We have power beyond our imaginations to change this world and strip the greedy murderers of all their power and all their “consent.” We are afraid to use it. We don’t believe in ourselves. We don’t trust each other. All that said we still have that power.

The most perfect tool in the world is the human hand. It can manipulate things in the real world. It can manipulate machines nature can not create. Those machines are made by something even more impressive than the human hand and that is the mind.

We all have minds and we are all guilty of letting our fears retard what they can do. We allow our experiences and lack there of to limit what we think we can do. We project those limitations on each other and say, “people will never get it.”

Well, maybe they won’t, but does that give us the right to stop trying? Is this what there is to life? Accepting our limitations and then giving up?

I think we are better than this. Where we are right now is in the shit hole. We are conducting wars on two continents while other wars we have a hand in are going on all over the place. Bush wants to invade Iran and as far as I can tell he will. Will this satisfy him? I doubt it.

Non violent resistance, whether it be direct and confrontational or by writing or talking to one another or reaching out to someone in need is the only way out of this. We need to listen and we need to speak. We need to be informed and we need to inform.

This world needs justice and curling up in a ball with a gun waiting for the boogey man to come and take us away to a detention center in some nebulous future that right now only our imagination can create is as unimaginative and uncreative as it gets.

Courage is not the absence of fear and nonviolence is not the absence of steadfast stubborn resistance. So look alive out there and take the opportunity given to us and think and act. Or so help me, if they do come for us we will have only ourselves to blame.

Peace.

Mike