Mesa Legend - ARCHIVES - Vol. 40, Issue 8


Volume 40, Issue 8. Today is .

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Volume 40, Issue 8.
January 21, 2003

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Renaming America’s Fear

Carly Schorman, News Editor
Carly Schorman
News Editor

Fear is the driving force behind America’s politics today.

In desperate attempts to establish feelings of security Americans are slowly relinquishing their rights and supporting actions that overstep reason.

The civil rights that were established during the twentieth century are being lost one by one so that citizens feel safe.

Is it just to single out a particular race or religion?

No.

Arizona residents should know better than most about the wrongs of racial profiling being home to the Japanese concentration camps of World War II.

Yet, we agreed to allow the government to single out and monitor citizens by ethnicity.

And once the government has selected this group to monitor for “safety” reasons, we continue to dissolve our basic human rights.

The monitoring of these citizens or residents does not recognize the right to privacy, allowing officials to peruse whatever information they feel is relevant without cause or justification.

The fun doesn’t stop there.

We are so terrified of the world beyond our borders, we allow our government to threaten and bully other nations until their resentment of the United States is so great they do pose a threat.

America’s “global police” policy is ultimately where the problem lies.
Ever since the U.S. decided to fill the role of big brother, we have continually overthrown governments, only to later replace them when our sense of control diminishes.

Originally, the world’s protector role was established to prevent the spread of communism.

Cuba was a country too close to America to institute a communist nation.

Fear of communism and the outside world placed our leaders in the position on a scale of previously unseen proportion.

The closest this country’s ever been to an all-out nuclear war was during the Bay of Pigs crisis; America versus the communists.

Despite, our power play, Cuba is still under communist rule today.

Russia, however, was our greatest adversary in the war against communism.

For decades the Cold War was quietly fought.

It was America’s need for control that identified an economic system and those who believed in it as enemies.

The U.S.S.R. eventually collapsed through its own political problems, not as the result of the intimidation attempted by either side.

Today, we aren’t fighting the communists, we are fighting terrorists.

In the war against terror, we have alienated a culture within our own society.

We have created a branch of the government to protect us from these hidden enemies that is reminiscent of the McCarthy era.

In the need to put a face on the enemy, we have allowed our politicians to substitute one war for another.

Because we are unable to directly battle the Taliban and other terrorist organizations, we have seen a sudden push for war in Iraq.

By renaming the opponent as Iraq and its leaders we have one country to bomb and obliterate unlike the terrorists who operate secretly in small groups that helps them elude captors.

One country is much easier to fight than many small groups, so we allowed our aggression to be redirected.

Even in our daily life do we allow fear to subdue us?

We continually try to guard against the next unforeseeable disaster.

Small pox drills are being conducted across the country.

Mesa high schools recently participated, volunteering students in need of immunization to receive the “small pox vaccine.”

I remember my mother telling me about the bomb drills held when she was in grade school.

She had to crouch under a desk mimicking what was expected should the Russians attack with atom bombs.

If or when America faces another attack most of our efforts will appear as futile as hiding under a desk during a nuclear attack.

And while many find contentment in the false sense of security the government provides in exchange for the absolution of some civil rights, Americans are creating larger problems in the long run.

The news should show us that often it is harder to fight your own government than another’s.

Perhaps re-examining the politics that have caused such animosity, not just from the terrorists, but allied nations as well, we might find the solution to two problems: our oppressive sense of “protection” and the world threatening to retaliate against that protection.