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Yeah? Patriot This!
2005-06-23 1:03 p.m.

While our country's government is busy fining twelve year old kids for downloading the new Lindsey Lohan album and getting frenzied over two men kissing each other or too many men using steroids, China, Japan, and India are busy developing and implementing alternative fuel sources. Pretty smart, considering oil spiked to $60 a barrel the other day. And lest we mope around like old-timers waiting for the price to fall, "since it always does", I have news that isn't terribly surprising: prices won't come down.

And while our political leaders talk with top priority about a "nation in moral crisis", "family values", and the "right to life", other countries are actually teaching SCIENCE in science classes, and are providing their children with FACTUAL information about sexual health. They're also using stem cell research to dramatically improve paralyzed and disabled people's mobility, develop new and better treatments for Alzheimer's disease, and re-grow organ tissue that many cancer survivors so desperately need to maintain their remission.

Just in case you're wondering where our tax dollars - the ones which fund our politicians' salaries - are going: Kansas' Attorney General, Phill Kline, spends most of his (and our) time trying to gain the right to access the private medical records of hospitals and reproductive health clinics, seeking out the names, addresses, sexual histories and medical profiles of all women who have had abortions in the last twenty years.

Now this may seem pointless to you - but wait! It really is important. You see, THIS WILL REALLY HELP THE COUNTRY. Don't ask me how, it just WILL. So we should be very THANKFUL that he spends A LOT OF OUR MONEY fighting the Kansas Supreme Court's attempts to protect women's and medical facilities' rights to privacy.

I really don't care how people feel about abortion rights. Well, Ok, that's not necessarily true. But I can SO suspend my own issues with that just to say that we should all agree on one thing: there are MANY other things that are a WEE bit more important right now than finding out which women in Kansas had abortions and when. Really - why does Kline want this information? So that he can...what? Knock on doors and drag women out in the street to be shot in the head? Round women up and put them into concentration camps? Force women and doctors to wear scarlet letters? What is this...The Handmaid's Tale?

Everyday, and more and more lately, some thing I hear on the news will remind me of the eerie back story contained in Atwood's 1986 book (The Handmaid's Tale). Atwood presents a full-on dystopic society in which women are rounded up like ghetto Jews during the Holocaust and put in particular places: some into extermination camps, some into forced prostitution, some into the homes of high ranking officials for use as a baby factory. But things didn't just all-of-the-sudden happen in Atwood's fictional world - things started slowly: the removal of this right or that, the violation of privacy here or there - and the eventual regressive ban on women's access to independence or autonomy (no women allowed to work, have credit cards or bank accounts, no women allowed in government). Atwood talks at length about having visited Afghanistan before writing the novel - and before the Taliban swept through and removed rights from women - as well as women themselves - in their new government. She saw a people treading a dangerous path, and not paying enough attention to what was about to happen.

While I don't mean to liken our culture to that of an extremist and fundamentalist group who ruled by terror and violence, I do fear the shared mentality of some of that aforementioned group and some of our own politicians. I find them equally as crazy, in many circumstances, and equally as capable of violence, subordination of entire races/classes, or of rights violations, just to meet and construct their own crazy agenda.

The problem is, the freak-o faction has moved from margin to center, and are now in charge of big, BIG parts of our government. They're involved in public policy, institutional decisions, and foreign relations. I'm afraid. Very afraid. And the world shares my fear: a recent poll revealed that many Australians fear the US is as much of a threat to world peace as is any terrorist or extremist group. They're not wrong.

There are so many unbelievable violations of constitutional rights, civil rights, and privacy that our government has been able to get away with, all because of September 11th. One almost has to admire the way the GOP seized the opportunity - I, for one, was numb for months after I watched the second tower fall from a hill in a park a town over from my mother's house. I couldn't think about anything for the next year; I have no idea how I even got through the semester teaching or preparing for graduate comp exams. Did I notice when people where signing once protected rights to privacy away? Absolutely not.

But we're in big fucking trouble right now. And little alarms go off in my head and my belly when I think about the next three years, the nukes that North Korea has, the relationships North Korea is trying to formulate with Iran and China, how much the rest of the world hates us, how we're detaining and torturing people without even trying them first, how our president's top priority seems to be validating his own ego by going on a promotional tour for his stupid social security plan, and how much The United States is becoming the KANSAS of the World. I love this country and am extremely patriotic - I always defend the country to the drunken aussies who want to pick a bar fight with me and my boo when we're somewhere abroad. But I'm scared and want out - only because I fear that one day, I might be rounded up and stuck into a concentration camp for my "dissension" or "agitation". I still work with Darwin in my writing classes, after all.

xoxoxo