As someone who came of age in the middle of the 60’s, the music of that time still resonates for me today.
Buffalo Springfield’s 1967 hit, “For What it’s Worth,” is one of those songs, whose lyrics — “There’s a man with … (fill in the blanks) … over there, telling me I got to beware” — are an accurate description of our society today. A fearful one, that places safety from real or imagined threats above everything else — even freedom, a word the ’60s was all about.
Some would describe me as being “stuck in the ’60s,” but as another writer pointed out recently, at least the ’60s was a decade in which change came about that had a profound impact for good and bad on the nation and the world. The decade we just turned the page on, the “00” years of the 21st Century, can be described as a period in which no positive impact happened in the world, but rather quite the opposite.
The “00” years are the period of time in which the darker side of our humanity ran rampant over the globe and this darker side was not only the province of the “bad people.”
It is rather like a contagion that infected our nation as well as other “civilized” nations to consider and use methods that had been in the tool kit of the outlaws of civilization: torture, kidnapping, secret hearings, denial of basic human rights and sanctioning the deaths of innocent people as necessary for the so-called greater good.
“There’s battle lines being drawn / nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong.”
Now, in the aftermath of the botched Christmas terror attack on an airliner by an alleged follower of the al- Qaida movement, we have seen the call for the overt profiling of Muslims, simply because they are Muslims, as a security precaution by high-ranking members of our government.
Another symptom of this contagion has been the placement of greed over simple human compassion and profit over human life by those we have entrusted with the privilege of representing our interests. In the debates on critical issues facing us as a nation, greed has been the winner. Fear has been used to confuse those who will be most affected by greed’s victory.
They are the Tea Partiers, those crowds of people driven by a fear mantra sung by those who represent greed: Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, to name a few.
“What a field-day for the heat / A thousand people in the street / Singing songs and carrying signs / Mostly say, ‘hooray for our side.'”
Lost in the shuffle are those who ask, “Who will protect us from the interests of greed?”
One of the nation’s founders, Benjamin Franklin, once said those who would give up their liberty for the sake of safety deserve neither. Franklin knew living in a free society is always a risk-filled venture. But a free society is more desirable than one where you are safe, but not free.
As a nation that has been evolving since Franklin’s time toward what Lincoln described as a “more perfect union,” have we reached a point where we should stand back and ask whether we are still on that track? President Obama will soon announce new policies to fill in the “holes” in our security perimeter. The question is, will the former teacher of Constitutional Law continue the marginalization of our basic freedoms started by the Bush administration?
Stephen Stills sang it best: “There’s something happening here / What it is ain’t exactly clear … paranoia strikes deep / Into your life it will creep / It starts when you’re always afraid / You step out of line, the man come and take you away … “
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