Americans are good people but we have been led astray. The answers are not found in the ideologies of the far right or the far left for that matter, they are found in the center.
(SALEM, Ore.) - In the land of the free, it is curious that we are now locked into our own country for the first time in history. Immigration paranoia has led the Bush administration to placing passport requirements on the entry of Canada and Mexico. How free do you feel this 4th of July?
I lived on the Mexican border for two years while working as a photojournalist/reporter for the Yuma, Arizona NBC station. We visited Mexico constantly then and learned amazing things about our neighbors to the south. I earned awards from the Associated Press for stories I shot in Mexico, but today that would not be possible if I did not have passport.
I resent this and I think millions of other Americans do also. I have had a passport for years because I take international assignments from time to time in the context of my work, but what about people who live tight and can't afford the expensive passport process?
They are now prisoners in their own country. For past generations, this would have been considered an outrageous act for a democracy like ours.
Today we are living with far fewer rights than before. The United States is far less of a free country than it once was, and I do not think that American forces have given their lives in service to their country to see this happen.
One of the stories I covered in Mexico in 1995 was a disaster cross-training exercise called "Disasters have no Borders" and we saw Arizona and California fire teams working and training closely with fire crews out of Sonora and Baja California, Mexico. The Marines were there, and so was the Mexican Army. The point is that we never really know how disasters, natural or man made, are going to go down. It takes transparency and communication and now; it apparently takes a passport.
This is just one small example of how our President has weakened this country. It is reflected in a series of lies that led us to Iraq, and also caused us to treat the war in Afghanistan for years as though it wasn't important. It has also brought us things like wiretapping and diminished privacy.
The government wants you to fear men in turbans who in reality, care very little about us. Most people in the world simply want to live and raise their families. But overly conservative factions like the Bush Administration and the Taliban and Al Qaeda want to control people, they want to manipulate and change functioning systems and aspects of society that others before them never would have considered.
To top it all off, today the LA Times reported that a federal investigation of unauthorized snooping into government passport files shows that these breaches of American privacy are far more common than previously believed. It has led the State Department inspector general to call for an overhaul of the program's management.
The Times reports, "In a report issued Thursday, the inspector general found 'many control weaknesses' in the department's administration program, including what investigators said was a lack of sound policies on training staff, accessing electronic records and disciplining workers who break privacy rules."
I hope that as we celebrate this 4th of July, we consider what has really happened in this country over the last seven and a half years. We will never have a real tally on the lies and deceit; and there may not be enough trees left in the world to print a book that long anyway. Americans are good people but we have been led astray. The answers are not found in the ideologies of the far right or the far left for that matter, they are found in the center. Americans have been turned against one another, and with a looming depression threatening if not already descending upon us, we are all the more compromised by the loss of our freedoms and the long list of flagrantly illegal acts committed by this President.
Celebrating the Independence Holiday as National PrisonersSalem-News.com