238 Years Later, Would Americans Still Choose Freedom Over Slavery?
"Is life so dear, or peace so
sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? I know not what
course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me
death!"--Patrick Henry
Imagine living in a country where armed
soldiers crash through doors to arrest and imprison citizens merely for
criticizing government officials. Imagine that in this very same country,
you're watched all the time, and if you look even a little bit suspicious, the
police stop and frisk you or pull you over to search you on the off chance
you're doing something illegal. Keep in mind that if you have a firearm of any
kind while in this country, it may get you arrested and, in some circumstances,
shot by police.
If you're thinking this sounds like America today,
you wouldn't be far wrong. However, the scenario described above took place
more than 200 years ago, when American colonists suffered under Great Britain's
version of an early police state. It was only when the colonists finally got
fed up with being silenced, censored, searched, frisked, threatened, and
arrested that they finally revolted against the tyrant's fetters.
No document better states their
grievances than the Declaration of Independence.
A document seething with outrage over a government which had betrayed its
citizens, the Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4, 1776, by 56 men
who laid everything on the line, pledged it all--"our Lives, our Fortunes,
and our sacred Honor"--because they believed in a radical idea: that all
people are created to be free.
Labeled traitors, these men were
charged with treason, a crime punishable by death. For some, their acts of
rebellion would cost them their homes and their fortunes. For others, it would
be the ultimate price--their lives. Yet even knowing the heavy price they might
have to pay, these men dared to speak up when silence could not be tolerated.
Even after they had won their independence from Great Britain, these new Americans
worked to ensure that the rights they had risked their lives to secure would
remain secure for future generations. The result: our Bill of Rights, the first
ten amendments to the Constitution.
Imagine the shock and outrage these 56
men would feel were they to discover that 238 years later, the government they
had risked their lives to create has been transformed into a militaristic
police state in which exercising one's freedoms is often viewed as a flagrant
act of defiance. Indeed, had the Declaration of Independence been written
today, it would have rendered its signers terrorists, resulting in them being
placed on a government watch list, targeted for surveillance of their
activities and correspondence, and potentially arrested, held indefinitely,
stripped of their rights and labeled enemy combatants.
Indeed, as I document in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State,
a cursory review of the true state of our freedoms as outlined in the Bill of
Rights shows exactly how dismal things have become:
The First
Amendment is supposed to protect the freedom to speak your mind and
protest in peace without being bridled by the government. It also protects the
freedom of the media, as well as the right to worship and pray without
interference. In other words, Americans cannot be silenced by the government.
Yet despite the clear protections found in the First Amendment, the freedoms
described therein are under constant assault. Whether it's a Marine detained for criticizing the government on Facebook,
a reporter persecuted for refusing to reveal his sources, or
a protester arrested for standing silently in front of the U.S.
Supreme Court, these are dangerous times for those who choose to exercise their
rights.
The Second
Amendment was intended to guarantee "the right of the people
to keep and bear arms." Yet while gun ownership has been recognized as an
individual citizen right, Americans continue to face an uphill battle in the
courts when it comes to defending themselves against militarized, weaponized
government agents armed to the hilt. In fact, court rulings in recent years have affirmed that citizens
don't have the right to resist police officers who enter their homes illegally,
mistakenly or otherwise.
The Third
Amendment reinforces the principle that civilian-elected officials
are superior to the military by prohibiting the military from entering any
citizen's home without "the consent of the owner." Unfortunately, the
wall of separation between civilian and military policing has been torn down in
recent years, as militarized SWAT teams are now allowed to burst into homes
unannounced in order to investigate minor crimes such as marijuana possession and credit card fraud. With domestic police increasingly
posing as military forces--complete with weapons, uniforms, assault vehicles,
etc.--a good case could be made for the fact that SWAT team raids constitute
the forced quartering of soldiers within the private home, which the Third
Amendment was written to prevent.
The Fourth
Amendment prohibits government agents from touching you or placing
you under surveillance or entering your property without probable cause and
even then, only with a court-sanctioned warrant. Unfortunately, the Fourth
Amendment has been all but eviscerated in recent years by court rulings and
government programs that sanction all manner of intrusions, including giving police carte blanche authority to break into homes or
apartments without a warrant, conduct roadside strip searches, and generally manhandle
any person in manner they see fit. Moreover, in the so-called name of national
security, intelligence agencies like the National Security Agency now have the
ability to conduct mass unwarranted electronic intrusions into the
personal and private transactions of all Americans, including phone, mail,
computer and medical records. All of this data is available to other government
agencies, including local police.
The Fifth
Amendment is supposed to ensure that you are innocent until proven
guilty, and government authorities cannot deprive you of your life, your
liberty or your property without following strict legal guidelines.
Unfortunately, those protections have been largely extinguished in recent
years, especially in the wake of Congress' passage of the National Defense Authorization Act
(NDAA), which allows the president and the military to arrest and detain
Americans indefinitely without due process.
The Sixth
Amendment was intended to not only ensure a "speedy and public
trial," but it was supposed to prevent the government from keeping someone
in jail for unspecified offenses. That too has been a casualty of the so-called
war on terror. Between the NDAA's indefinite detention clause and the Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) legislation,
which has been used as justification for using drones to kill American citizens
in the absence of a court trial, the Sixth Amendment's guarantees become
meaningless.
The Seventh
Amendment guarantees citizens the right to a jury trial. However,
when the populace has no idea of what's in the Constitution--civic education
has virtually disappeared from most school curriculums--that inevitably
translates to an ignorant jury incapable of distinguishing justice and the law
from their own preconceived notions and fears.
The Eighth
Amendment is similar to the Sixth in that it is supposed to protect
the rights of the accused and forbid the use of cruel and unusual punishment.
However, the Supreme Court's determination that what constitutes "cruel
and unusual" should be dependent on the "evolving standards of
decency that mark the progress of a maturing society" leaves us with
little protection in the face of a society lacking in morals altogether.
America's continued reliance on the death penalty, which has been shown to be flawed in its application and execution, is a perfect
example of this.
The Ninth
Amendment provides that other rights not enumerated in the
Constitution are nonetheless retained by the people. Popular sovereignty--the
belief that the power to govern flows upward from the people rather than
downward from the rulers--is clearly evident in this amendment. However, it has
since been turned on its head by a centralized federal government that sees
itself as supreme and which continues to pass more and more laws that restrict
our freedoms under the pretext that it has an "important government
interest" in doing so. Thus, once the government began violating the
non-enumerated rights granted in the Ninth Amendment, it was only a matter of
time before it began to trample the enumerated rights of the people, as
explicitly spelled out in the rest of the Bill of Rights.
As for the Tenth Amendment's reminder that the people and the states
retain every authority that is not otherwise mentioned in the Constitution,
that assurance of a system of government in which power is divided among local,
state and national entities has long since been rendered moot by the
centralized Washington, DC power elite--the president, Congress and the courts.
Indeed, the federal governmental bureaucracy has grown so large that it has
made local and state legislatures relatively irrelevant. Through its many
agencies, the federal government has stripped states of the right to regulate
countless issues that were originally governed at the local level.
Thus, even on those rare occasions when
the courts provide us with a slight glimmer of hope that all may not be lost,
those brief reprieves of judicial sensibility are quickly overwhelmed by a
bureaucratic machine that continues to march relentlessly in lockstep with the
police state.
This brings me back to those 56 men who
risked everything--their fortunes and their lives--to speak truth to power in
that sweltering Philadelphia
heat 238 summers ago. Of those 56 signers, 9 died during the Revolution, 5 were
captured by British soldiers, 18 had their homes looted and burned by the Red
Coats, 2 were wounded in battle and 2 lost their sons during the war.
Remarkably, these men--who were community leaders, business owners, judges,
lawyers and inventors--sacrificed their lives, their fortunes and their sacred
honor so that you and I could live freely in a nation where we have the right
to stand up and speak out against tyrannical government. In the face of torture
and even death, they did not waver.
The choice before us is clear. In the
words of Patrick Henry, will we choose dangerous freedom or peaceful slavery?
John W. Whitehead is an attorney and
author who has written, debated and practiced widely in the area of
constitutional law and human rights. Whitehead's aggressive, pioneering
approach to civil liberties has earned him numerous accolades and (more...)
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