Free, But Not Free To Kill, Patriot Act

It should be of no surprise to anyone that since the Patriot Act was passed, the vocal minority that wants it abolished will not shut up about it and get on with their lives. Well, unless you can propose something that can protect our lives better than that, you should just shut up. When you don’t like the law that you made, you change it. Pretty much the same way it was made. Meanwhile, about 63 percent of the country believe it is just fine.

This vocal minority spans party lines; it is the wacko ends of the democrat and republican parties. Talk about strange bedfellows. No, we won’t go there. I checked my thesaurus on wacko and it came up with crackpot, weirdo, lamebrain, nut, kook, dingbat, screwball, oddball, and ding-a-ling. So for lack of a more descriptive term, ‘wacko’ will do just fine.

The common thread in their opposition to the Patriot Act is their fear that it will be abused. If you follow this logic to it’s ultimate conclusion, they hold to the notion that we would be better off dead without the Patriot Act than to effectively deal with the real threats at hand. This perverse denial of reality defies reason. The reality is, there are people who want to kill us. The reality is, it’s going to take physical intervention to stop an attack from occurring. The reality is, shredding a document called the Patriot Act will pretty much guarantee that physical intervention will not occur.

How would these people answer this question? “Knowing that the enemy is in 68 countries and probably still in the United States, and knowing that they need money to operate, and knowing they use electronics to communicate, and knowing they fly airplanes, and have in fact used them to kill, and have hundreds of other ways to kill us, and will if given the chance: What would you do that would enable the government to pre-empt an attack here in the United States, better than what the Patriot Act can? You simply have to draw the line that yes, we are a free people, but we are not free to kill.

To Believe This