I'm baaaaack...

Hi all,
No you're not seeing things, here's a new post from AuntieM! I didn't fall off the edge of the earth, and I didn't pay an involuntary visit to Gitmo, I've just been crazy scary busy for the last four months. It's not that I didn't think about this blog, I just didn't have the time or energy. The election wore me out but it was a fantastic kind of tired. I spent lots of my free time working on the Obama campaign, then after the election it was exams, then the dreaded few weeks of holiday hell. Included in that was taking my GRE and getting into grad school, finding a second job, taking care of a sick cat that we eventually had to have put down (a moment of silence in memory of BoyCat, please. Thank you.), and trying to maintain some semblance of a life with Hubby, GirlCat and friends.

All in all it's been a wild four months but I'm starting to get my feet under me again and things are beginning to stabilize. I'm still getting my act together in regards to juggling two jobs and a full-time course load, so I have dedicated this weekend to catching up on school work. One of the items I had to complete was a post for my Global Issues class, in which my professor posted some questions that were so interesting that I wanted to preserve my response for posterity. Here we go:

The questions: Do you think that defending national security means having to give up some personal freedoms? Would you mind if government officials read your emails or listened in on your telephone conversations to be sure you were not planning to engage in terrorism? Why or why not? Explain your position.

My answer: Benjamin Franklin said “Those who sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither.” I do not believe that the way to defend our essential liberties is to forfeit them in exchange for a false sense of security. Defending the security of this nation should include preserving the personal freedoms that characterize this country, not giving them up the moment the threat level goes to ‘orange’. Surrendering our freedoms means living in a police state instead of a democracy.

Government surveillance of individuals doesn’t increase our security; on the contrary, it makes us all suspects. Our legal system is based on the premise of ‘innocent until proven guilty’, but in the case of government surveillance, the reverse is true for each and every citizen. I would object strenuously to any form of government surveillance on a private citizen without probable cause and a court order. (And I’ve often wondered just who in Washington is reading my blog. First Amendment rights, baby, use them or lose them.) I can hear echoes of a phrase used in movies: “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.” But we should fear plenty when our government starts snooping in our private lives and personal correspondence. We should fear being detained indefinitely without due process. We should fear being questioned and having to justify our actions on seemingly innocent matters. We should fear having to watch our speech and wonder who is listening. We should fear when our own country, which has long claimed the moral high ground on human rights and condemned countries that utilize torture, uses “intensive interrogation” or whatever euphemism they use to put a happy face on waterboarding and other means of torture. If we have to give up our personal liberties, then we might as well surrender because we’ve already lost ourselves and our country.

It feels sooooo good to rant and rabblerouse again! I'll be back again soon, but now I must return to the homework marathon. Two classes done so far today, two more to go by tomorrow night. Repeat after me: I can do anything for one semester.

Later,
AuntieM