Shut Up, or Else

If you protest something, anything, you can wind up on a terror watch list.

Actor Mark Ruffalo has been placed on a terror advisory list by U.S. officials after organizing screenings for a new documentary about natural gas drilling.

If you exercise your First Amendment rights, that makes you a terrorist. No, that is not a question, anymore, it is a frakking statement of fact.

No doubt that soon it will be considered to be a terrorist act to own a gun (2nd Amendment), keep soldiers from living in your house (3rd Amendment), tell the cops they have to show you a search warrant (4th Amendment), exercise your right to remain silent (5th Amendment), have the right to cross-examine witnesses against you (6th Amendment) or not be tortured (8th Amendment).

So it has come to this: Protesting peacefully is an act of terrorism. Hunter S. Thompson was right when he wrote this 38 years ago:

"This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it — that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable."*

We have become a nation of fearful pantswetters when all it takes is organizing screenings of a movie to get one labeled as a terrorist.

40 or so years ago, my youngest brother asked my (now deceased) father why Republican politicians were so against funding education. Dad (who had voted for Tricky Dick) said that people who have not been well educated, who have not been taught how to think critically, were more easily led and were more susceptible to propaganda.

So here we are now, with a population that is falling behind other nations on virtually every educational metric that there is. We have large segments of this population that will go around screaming "Obama is a communist" without any conceivable idea what communism was. We have a political party that has national candidates which are aggressively ignorant and proud of the fact that they don't know a damned thing. Understanding and conclusions based on facts are deemed by them to be "elitist". As my father foresaw, we have a country where tens of millions of people swallow political propaganda whole, without applying any critical thought to it.

And if you challenge their views, some of them indeed will be roused to violence.

I weep for this country.

(H/T)
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* My apologies to used car salesmen on this one.