SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION

Commentator Steve Chapman probably said it best, "The Bush administration has managed to cross George Orwell with Sting. Every step you take, every move you make, Big Brother will be watching you."

The Bush administration wants to amass a record of every call ever made. As one insider told USA Today, "It's the largest database ever assembled in the world." Consider that that makes every U.S. citizen a suspect. Many peoples' reaction is 'I'm not doing anything wrong, so I'm OK with it.' You can't tell me there are not calls you make that you don't want other people to hear.

Consider this: you decide to sell your car or some other item through an ad. You're going to get quite a number of calls from people you don't know. Let's say a member of a terrorist cell needs a car and decides to buy yours. You've just been put in the loop of suspects without knowing it or even intending to participate.

You may also say that the worst thing you do is attend protest rallies and they are legal. Once we start giving up these freedoms we have we end up on a slippery slope. Today's legal protest rallies would become tomorrow's attack against government authorities. Some people would say it's unpatriotic to protest and would accept it as unlawful. This slow chipping away of our freedoms takes us unknowingly from today's democracy to tomorrows dictatorship and police state. You wake up one morning saying, "How did we get to this?" By allowing your fear to give up your freedom for perceived security.

Which takes me to Ben Franklin's saying, "Anyone who would give up any freedom for a bit of security deserves neither."

Doesn't it seem strange to anyone that we are supposedly fighting in Iraq to bring freedom to those people while it's being taken away from us here in the U.S. We're putting this tool in the hands of an administration that's responsible for leaking an active agent's name, Valerie Plame. The President himself lied about this. He claimed to oust anyone responsible for the leak only to find out it was the President himself.

Think about how secretive this administration has been and still is. And much of the secrecy is over possible wrong doing that they don't want investigated due to 'national security'. If the American people don't start taking these things seriously and start speaking out we make wake up one morning and find ourselves in a place that looks more like 'nazi Germany' or 'Communist Russia' than the United States of America.