Monday, 31 August 2009

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  This is MY America

  Most people believe that the First Amendment to the United States Constitution gave us the right of free speech.  We were taught that the First Amendment granted us the right to protest things that we think are wrong, the right to worship however we choose to worship, and the right to tell the government to shut the fuck up without the fear of being arrested.  That the first paragraph to the Bill of Rights grants us all of these rights is a common misconception.   The truth is that the First Amendment didn’t give us any of these rights.  My speech would have been free whether I was born in colonial America, Cerritos, California, or Pyongyang North Korea.  As far as I’m concerned, freedom of speech is one of the existential rights of simply being alive.  Freedom of speech isn’t an American political manifesto; it’s Universal Law.  It doesn’t need to be declared on a political document because politics has a bad habit of complicating otherwise uncomplicated common sense.

  For example:

  • Physicians in California, who are generally conservative, are mostly against the creation of a national health insurance option because of the effect it might have on the revenue they get from private insurance companies.  However, eye doctors in California became irate when Medi-Cal, a state-subsidized insurance plan, recently stopped providing eye care benefits for its recipients, thus stopping payments to eye doctors.

  • The original Christians in this country came to the New World to escape religious persecution.  However, today the Christian right invests millions of dollars to get legislation enacted to prohibit people from marrying within their own gender.  By protecting their values, they, in effect, are persecuting those who don’t agree with them.
    

  • People who opposed and protested George Bush’s decision to wage war with Iraq were called unpatriotic by conservatives.  The conservative right has a tendency to label liberals as “unpatriotic” for opposing government, but conservatives were the ones who called for secession when the Obama administration took office.  For all intents and purposes, this is treason, which, by definition, is the most unpatriotic act of all.

  I consider myself to be a politically conscious person, but in today’s climate of intense propaganda, religious fundamentalism, special interest lobbying, hidden agendas, and economic globalization, it’s not hard to become desensitized and unconsciousness to political reality.  What is reality?  Reality is that there are conservatives who will fiercely defend their way of life and that there are liberals who will fight to change what they believe is wrong.  But what is surreal is that most of these people don’t know what side they’re really on. 

  Carrying an American flag, singing a cheesy hymn about mountains and eagles, or being proud about carrying a gun doesn’t make you more or less American than the next person.  It just means that you like doing those things.  Being a “patriot” is about doing what’s best for the country and not religion, special interests, or hidden agendas.

  And I didn’t need the fucking First Amendment to say that.

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