It is a time of freedom and fear, of Gaia and of borders, of many paths and the widening of
a universal toll road, emptying country and swelling cities, of the public bought into
privacy and the privacy of the public sold into invisible data banks and knowing
algorithms. It is the time of the warrior's peace and the miser's charity, when the
planting of a seed is an act of conscientious objection.
These are the times when maps fade and direction is lost. Forwards is backwards now, so we glance sideways at the strange lands through which we are all passing, knowing for certain only that our destination has disappeared. We are unready to meet these times, but we proceed nonetheless, adapting as we wander, reshaping the Earth with every tread. Behind us we have left the old times, the standard times, the high times. Welcome to the irregular times. Reason #1201 to Boot Bush: In a climate tolerant of authoritarian abuse, intelligence agents of the United States Army asserted the right (and succeeded in their effort earlier this year) to question students at the University of Texas who were asking "suspicious" questions at a conference there on Islamic law. The response of any sane presidential administration would be to condemn such dangerous expansion of Army power into surveillance of and control over citizens' lives. Haven't there been enough brutal dictatorships to show us the folly of that path? The Bush administration, of course, did not follow the path of sanity. Instead, it responded by slipping language into a Senate bill that would give Military Intelligence sweeping new authority to watch over and intervene in the lives of law-abiding citizens right here in the United States. (Source: Newsweek June 21, 2004) Click here to read our other 1,200 reasons to give Bush the Boot this November. ![]() ![]() ![]() |