There was a time, not too long ago, when there was a country called the Sweet Land of Liberty. In those days, before September 11, 2001, the name of the United States represented many wonderful things. Things like liberty and justice for all, “do not fire unless fired upon”, separation of powers, good will towards all nations and promoting “the general welfare.”

Since George Bush became President and especially after September 11, all of these things exist only in sentimental memory. In its place is another, dark United States. It is a country where its people live with a constant quiet fearfulness. It is a country where any one of us could be taken away by the police and locked away for years, without charges, without access to a lawyer, without a trial. We will have just disappeared, as people did in Argentina, El Salvador and Guatemala.

It is a country where any speech directly opposing the government’s policies is marked treasonous, and no one who disagrees with the President is allowed to see him in public. It is a country where all of us are under surveillance, and our privacy is almost gone. It is a country which commits acts of agression on its neighbors in the world, and defies any nation or group of nations to stop it.

It is a nation where its press,Chief Executive, Supreme Court and Congress are captive to its most powerful citizens, making all these institutions unresponsive to their own people. It is a nation where the richest citizens take from the poor, and run all government institutions for their own further enrichment.

In short, America is now more akin to one of those Banana Republics with its tinhorn dictator that we traditionally scorn.

Your comments are welcome.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 31st, 2006 at 11:28 pm and is filed under Bush, The Quork Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.