Apathy

"Do not fear your enemies. The worst they can do is kill you. Do not fear friends. At worst, they may betray you. Fear those who do not care; they neither kill nor betray, but betrayal and murder exists because of their silent consent." -- Bruno Jasienski

Fear is a big thing now days. Fear of terrorists. Fear of natural disaster. Fear of avian flu. If we're always scared, then we'll look the other way when our freedoms are being taken. But the thing we really need to fear is apathy. We can't become so desensitized to death in Iraq that we don't care about the war any more. We can't become so desensitized to corruption in government that we stop being critical of it.

I've seen it bandied about too much on some of our blogs that because Bush won the election, that must mean he was given tacit approval for the way in which he runs government. He won because of the fear and apathy I've mentioned before. People were afraid of terrorism and they felt that Bush presented the best choice for handling it. They became so blinded by single issues (abortion, gun rights) that they hurt themselves economically. As Thomas Frank says in What's the Matter with Kansas, "By separating class from economics, [those leading the cultural backlash] have built a Republican friendly alternative for the disgruntled blue-collar American." How else could you explain that a Yale/Harvard/Skull and Bones blueblood with a multi-millionaire Washington insider dad could be viewed as a man of the people?

I've also seen it said in many places (TV and otherwise), that because Bush is a "man of God", then all is well. I know personally many people that voted for Bush that practically believe that he can walk on water. Anything short of them personally witnessing the President killing someone is OK and they will rationalize imperialism, corruption, torture, you name it. This mass cognitive dissonance is astounding. They will continually adjust their beliefs to try and match it to the reality around them. And they will deny they are doing it.

And our media, god bless them, are worthless. They are too chicken-shit to do any actual investigative work because of their ties to the corporations that own them. And those outlets that are in bed with the government (FOX) show their indignation with government corruption by lamenting that it is being exposed at all. Bill O'Reilly is a piece of work. He worries that government indictments will hurt the country. William "first family of neo-conservatism" Kristol thinks that the "criminalization of politics that’s really gotten totally out of hand". It does not bother them at all what has created the situation. To them, all is fair in politics. Is that what our representative democracy was supposed to be?

It's not our job to blindly follow everything our government says. There is no reason to believe everything that they tell us when they are proven again and again to be lying to us. There is no reason to believe that they are better informed than we are. And we should not stand by idly and assume that things will be taken care of by someone else. Be informed. Be vigilant.

"It is not the function of our government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error." -- US Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson