MGW: Matthew’s January Column

Final deadline day at the magazine and I am here late. Imagine it’ll be a 1am-er or so the way things are going. So what am I doing writing a blog? Hey! 5 minutes sanity break, right? And I said I would post my new column. It’s kida lame. I have to condense everything to under 600 words. The way I ramble? It sounds all chopped up! Anyway It is posted below. Also, in the next MGW look for my interviews with Fashion Designer Andrew Christian and Singer Levi Kreis.

Column:

Shhh! Quiet! Someone’s listening! Their ears are pressed against the walls. They are tapping the phone. They are next to you at the coffee shop and recording what you say. They are in your house while you are gone—reading the post-its on your fridge. They are CCed all your emails. They open your letters. They know what’s on your Netflix Queue.

They have trained your plants to report to them using some-sort of florescent light language. Or maybe it’s the cat? He never wants to be held anymore—maybe he’s an informant. He’s just waiting to hear you say something anti-establishment so he can rat you out.

Scared yet? You better be, or there’s gonna be another red alert for a terror attack. Then you’ll be glad they’re reading your text messages.

The Homeland Security Act has done its job. It’s made we regular citizens look over our shoulder and watch what we say. Introduced in the aftermath of September 11, the Department of Homeland Security is the largest government reorganization since the Department of Defense was created. The HSA is a sweeping anti-terrorism bill giving federal law enforcement agencies broad powers to monitor citizens.

Many argue that Civil liberties are imperiled by the Homeland Security Act. The rights to freedom of speech, religion, assembly and privacy; the rights to counsel and due process; and protection from unreasonable searches and seizures all are called into question. Will they be upheld? Or pushed aside for “the good of the people”?

So basically the government wants to make sure we are loyal citizens and we want the freedom to be loyal citizens without being checked up on.

But with Big Brother looking over our shoulders, how is our society being impacted? With the threat of being legally taken into custody for speaking out against government policy, it makes one cautious. When we see it happening, as it has a number of times—and who knows how many more times that have been unreported—it more than makes one cautious, it can make one downright paranoid. Especially when you have a reputation of being…discontent…with the current administration.

I began thinking more about this several weeks ago when I was on my cell phone discussing the Sadaam hanging. My friend and I were agreeing that the sooner President Bush was out of office, the better. We then followed our statements with affirmations that we didn’t want to see him assassinated.

We then discussed that we were against the death penalty and felt Sadaam should not have been hanged. We followed this with affirmations that we both thought he was a mass-murdering dickhead and had no sympathy for him. Hmm…

We continued our discussion and each time we touched on a hot political topic, I noticed we both followed our feelings with a party-line statement as if we both felt we were being listened in on—or thought the other may be working for “them” trying to round up the dissidents.

When did we become too afraid to speak our mind? When did our American-ingrained right to free speech mutate into a wishy-washy half statement?

Fuck that! Bush sucks, they shouldn’t have hung Sadaam and the war on Iraq is a contrived fiasco that needs to end. So there!