Dear Rest Of The World: It's Painful For Us Americans To See What Is Happening to Edward Snowden.

 ”This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing Government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.”–Abraham Lincoln, 1861.

BUT… That’s too much like work. Until it happens to you. And it is. Personal privacy including information WAS guaranteed by the United States Constitution, the document under which enshrined protection you live. If you are not aware of the fact that this government, your government, has scrapped enough of your Bill of Rights to put you in harm’s way, then you are not paying attention… and will pay the price for it –  tom dennen

Here he is flying from Hong Kong to Russia — countries that seem like safe havens from the long reach of the U.S. empire. Where will he end up? Could be Iceland, Venezuela, or Ecuador. He needs someplace to go where the authorities can’t be intimated to turn him over to his jailers and possible executioners.

   It’s either that or face the chair for doing the right thing. Even though I understand the corruption of the system — and I get just how bad things really are — it’s still hard to process. The law under which he has been charged dates from 1917, and its sole purpose was to destroy the peace movement of the time. As Woodrow Wilson said before the law passed, “Creatures of passion, disloyalty, and anarchy must be crushed out.”

And they were. If you spoke out against the war, you were arrested. Papers were effectively nationalized. Prices were controlled. Independent thinkers of all types were jailed. Actually, a number of Americans at the time fled to Russia for freedom and found themselves in the middle of the Bolshevik Revolution. Then, like now, the choice was the frying pan or the fire.

So yes, we know that America has not been itself for a long time. Maybe it never was. But still, we read the Federalist Papers. We read Thomas Jefferson. We read the Declaration, the Constitution, the words of Madison and Paine. We just can’t shake the idea that there is something to this notion that government ought to be limited and that people have the right to freedom.

Snowden is a good young man who wanted his fellow citizens to know what our own government is doing to us. He wanted to warn us that our own government is reading our emails and chats and listening in on our phone calls. He blew the whistle on the alarming fact that our own government is assembling a vast database from which it can draw at any point in the future, essentially putting the government in a position to blackmail every citizen forever.

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