Thanks to countless television shows and movies, I think you’d be hard pressed to find someone in America that doesn’t know about the Miranda Warnings. Keeping those rights in mind, watch the video below (Hat tip: Blue Collar Muse).
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMB6L487LHM]
This is not a partisan issue. The previous administration put the TSA in place under the guise of safeguarding America. The intrusion on freedom and privacy concerned me then, and it concerns me now. Review history, and you’ll discover that it does not take long for governments to move from intrusive to oppressive. There are ample number of examples on the left and the right.
It is easy to look back at how the Nazi’s round up Jews during World War II and wonder how all of those millions of people allowed themselves to be loaded up into cattle cars and taken to their deaths. Yet, look at how quickly we’ve given up the right to move freely around the country. It’s been less than 10 years, and already the nation has grown accustomed to moving through cattle lines for processing and being detained for questioning.
The Nazi’s did not start filing people into ovens from Day One. There were steps that were taken to acclimate the public over a number of years. They were taken in the name of national interest.
The continued and ever growing encroachment on our personal freedoms coupled with the global economic crisis and escalation of the threats by North Korea and in the Middle East are a combination that historically have set the stage for increased government control and oppression.
Am I being overly alarmist? I don’t think so. As George Santayana so aptly wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
Today, I turn 40. I would like to enjoy for the next forty years of my life the same freedoms I have enjoyed during the first forty. But, more importantly, I’d like my children and their children’s children to enjoy those freedoms. For that to happen, we must ALL safeguard those freedoms regardless of political persuasion. We are no longer at the precipice of a slippery slope. We are now sliding down it.