Historic Perspective of the Times

The moving trucks are parked in front of the White House and in two weeks the country will have a dramatic changing of the executive guard to begin its transition from one extreme of ideology to its opposite. President Barack Hussein Obama has been a wolf in sheep's clothing for the past eight years. After the nightmare he inherited from the George Bush presidency, Obama was hailed as a great hope for change. The color of his skin, his international upbringing, his intelligence and global outlook brought with it a wave of optimism. But instead of changing Bush policies, the Obama administration codified them, becoming a second administration that lived outside the law, governing without respect for the foundational laws of the American system. The evisceration of the rule of law is most apparent in the National Defense Authorization Act which eradicates our basic fundamental freedom, due process. Without deference to the law, our country is becoming increasingly like a jungle. Einstein said that when a country doesn't obey its laws the laws will be disrespected by all. There is a good reason for the institution of Habeas corpus, or due process. This most basic of rights must be restored.

Despite being a constitutional scholar, Obama has defied the law at every turn. If you look at domestic policy, Obama never broke with the Wall Street friendly policies of the Bush administration. Foreign policy has seen military action around the world grow out of control as it has expanded to many new theaters under our Nobel Peace Prize President. Under this administration there has been no cutback whatsoever on the things we found most odious about the Bush administration; instead they have expanded. Obama ordered more drone attacks in his first eight months than Bush had in his entire presidency. It seems like Obama took the most repulsive CIA policies and branded them, so that targeted assassinations and extra-judicial duties as judge, jury, and executioner without due process were declared acceptable actions for the President of the United States, far exceeding even the Bush excesses.

Obama entered the White House with claims to being the most transparent president; instead more documents have been classified under Obama than under Bush. Surveillance of ordinary citizens has grown exponentially; incarcerations without preview by trial have also soared since the Bush years. The U.S. Government now intercepts more than 1.7 billion messages a day from its citizens - emails, telephone calls, and other forms of communication. A nightmare estate has been created with over nine million people watching over us with security clearances, one million of which have top clearances. We are living in a fish bowl, an Orwellian 1984 type of state, whether we have come to accept it or not.

The sad thing is that younger people do accept it without much question. They seem to have no more than a five minute attention span and maybe a five minute memory of the past. While millennials may be passionate about doing something, their focus is limited to wanting to treat the symptoms without consideration for rooting out the cause. While our country may not yet be oppressive on the surface, in our hearts we know there is now no place to hide. All of us are exposed and categorized in some sort of government data base. There is an underlying obsessive fear that if there should be a second 9-11 type event, the government crackdown would be so egregious that our entire Constitution may be shredded in an instant. We have become a nation that fears not only the terrorist aggression of the rest of the world, but a nation of citizens that fears its own government as a threat of potential imminent oppression and tyranny.

How have we gotten to the point where discourse is so dumbed down that we cannot even acknowledge obvious truths without ridicule or prosecution? People are increasingly uninformed because there are serious constraints on public discourse. The media, as government instrument, does not want people to think in a critical way, only react in prescribed ways; it aims to feed people with a steady, ever shocking diet of sensational crises to create a sense of helplessness and need to be governed. When people don't understand their history they will not have any vision for the future and what is possible. If you believe that the narrative we are experiencing right now, driven by dollars and greed, is all that is possible, then you won't foresee how much better our future can be than our present. History alerts us to the fact that we have been here before. The past is always prologue to the future. Gore Vidal referred to us as the United States of Amnesia. If we don't pay attention to the cyclical mistakes made in the past, then we are doomed to repeat them.

A fundamental morality has been lost somewhere along the way. The end does not always justify the means as the recent policy shift would have us believe. With the arrival of a new group of ideologues to man the tiller in Washington, let us hope the brash motivated new leadership can set amends to the drift of the last thirty years away from the constitutional fundamentals that made this country exceptional.