This is the kind of article that gets my blood up. Until I think about it. Then I sink into despair.
Think it’s bad that 36% of the U.S. high school students in this survey think newspapers should get government approval of stories before publishing? I think it’s worse than that. I think 36% of the students surveyed were honest enough to say what they really thought. I think at least that many more answered the survey by saying what they knew they were supposed to say.
I don’t want the power to peer into peoples’ souls. I’m afraid of what I’d see. The Bill of Rights is simply wasted on many of us. I suspect a lot of U.S. citizens would be perfectly happy living under a benevolent dictatorship. Hell, I suspect a significant number would be happy living under a less than benevolent dictatorship, so long as those of their own skin color or religion weren’t oppressed.
How many of us would take to the streets for freedom of the press? And what about Amendment IV, the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects? My god, the Supreme Court is gutting it before our very eyes, and hardly anyone outside the ACLU is so much as saying, “Hey, wazzup with that?”
We need to learn from the keep-and-bear-arms folks – now there are some people who are willing to defend constitutionally-guaranteed freedoms. Well, one freedom, anyway.
missinglink 02/01/05 7:54 AM
Well, except that the first amendment is pretty clearly stated, and supporters of the second amendement have to rely on ignoring that pesky preceding dependent clause about militias.
Not saying that I’m particularly for or against gun rights, although I do give the NRA headquarters the finger whenever I drive by it, I’m just saying the second amendment clearly says that because we need to have militias to defend the country, people (who will be in the militia) need guns (at the time, there wasn’t a standing army). Personally, I think the country would be better off deprecating the second amendment as no longer logically valid and try to write up some other philosophy of gun rights so that responsible owners can be split off from the nuts who think it ought to be easier to get a gun than a license to drive a car.
Dick 02/04/05 12:58 PM
It is worrisome. But it is not that the Bill of Rights is wasted as much as we take it for granted, and in doing that, we lose sight of what it really means. The problem with freedom is that it can get upsetting when some wacko is out there practicing it. Take that guy Newdow who is trying to get “under God” out of the Pledge of Allegiance. Hey, he has the right to do that and others have the right to tell him to go piss off. Let the battle be joined for that is what it is all about.
Missinglink may be on to something about the Second Amendment. Try parsing it grammatically and you come up scratching your head. It’s those damn commas. As to the NRA, it is simply another organization where a some people have found a way to make a lucrative living by beating an issue and organizing the faithful, much like the NAACP, ACLU, AMA, AARP, etc. Sooner or later, from some backwoods cabin, a major fund raiser will emerge to “Save the Hash!” Or am I being too cynical?
missinglink 02/08/05 3:21 AM
Except, of course, ‘under God’ was only added to the pledge in the 50’s as a marketing effort to differentiate the US from the ‘Godless Communists.’
As an atheist, the ‘under God’ has always bugged me as unnecessary and slightly exclusionary.