The Good 'Ol Days

Mel and I have been buying the X-files seasons on DVD. Mulder and Scully in the first three seasons have tacked corporate cover-ups by bad pharmaceudical companies, secret internal goverment agencies, ailens aided by the US military- I guess what I'm getting at is- What ever happened to the good 'ol days when it was our government that we all distrusted?

I'm not quite old enough to remember Watergate, but i do remember Iran-Contragate, or the Savings and loan scandal, or all the hubub surrounding the Clinton family's dealings. I remember that prior to 9-11 we all had a nice healthy amount of skepticism towards what the government was doing behind our backs.

Have you read the Patriot Act? do you know and understand how much power and freedom it gives to the very agencies we suspected, loathed, feared or even despised in the 90's?

Every ounce of power we give our government now is power they can use against us in the future. Lord Acton, a British historian of the late nineteenth anf twentieth century said that "power corrupts, but absolute power corrupts absolutely." If they can tap phone lines and read the emails of Arab-Americans and Muslims now, there's nothing to stop them from doing it to Christians, or Buddists, or the next religio-ethnic group to fall out of our government's good graces.

Yes, our country is great, but it is our Constitution, our liberties, and our freedoms that make our country great- not our militry, or our global strength, or our ability to piss-off and alienate half the world.

Maybe the ACLU should spend less time trying to get the Ten Commandments out of courtrooms and more time actually protecting the civil liberties of Americans. Maybe actually finding Osama Bin Laden should be a higher priority for our President.

Just remember, it is still just as important now as it was then that we take a little of Mulder's advice and trust no one.