-- or are we too fat, dumb and happy to bother?
Yes, I think we're at a crisis point. Taking away basic civil liberties is a serious matter, because once taken away, it's almost impossible to get them back. As a rule, they don't get taken away by dramatic strokes, but rather eaten away, eroded. That's what Bush and company (read Cheney) are doing. The difficulty is that a lot of people simply don't care, either because they approve of harsh treatment of people they perceive as enemies, or because they simply use all their energy just getting through the day.
The hope is the peculiar genius of a democratic form of government. Over time it tends to balance itself, to correct wild swings that result from crises and reach a stable point. It remains to be seen whether we can do that under the current stresses. Winston Churchill said that democracy is a very poor form of government --- but it's better than any other form we have been able to come up with.
The people at the controls right now are ideologues, and if they have their way we will end up with some kind of unholy alliance of big business and Christian conservatism. Military-industrial theocracy isn't something I would like to live under. I used to vote Republican. I won't anymore. I didn't leave the GOP; they left me. But the Dems aren't much better. A viable Independent Party might be the answer, but the pols on both sides of the aisle will do their level best to stop that from happening, because it threatens their grip on power. Yeah, I'd call that a crisis. W will go down, I am confident, as the worst President we have ever had, against some stiff competition (e.g., Harding). The damage he has done -- diplomatic, social, financial, military -- will take generations to correct. He richly deserves to be impeached, or even tried as a war criminal. But I don't think we are up to that, for reasons cited above.
2007-09-19
06:01:00
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13 answers
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Anonymous
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Civic Participation