Going Fourth

This Fourth of July has probably got to be one of the most depressing in recent memory for me.  It's depressing because what has been for almost two and a half centuries a celebration of freedom feels so unspeakably hollow to me.  And it shouldn't.

Where to begin?  We've got the major scandal with the NSA's multiple prevarications, re-issued press releases that are completely re-written, and the full degree of exactly how much they've been vacuuming up from the Internet in terms of personal data which they have no business even looking at, much less holding.  It isn't news to me that the NSA has been doing this kind of crap.  It's only news in the scale.  And, like so many other things that have been rammed down our throats over the last decade or so, it's all "national security" this and "terrorism" that.  Part of me thinks that finally, maybe at last, this will get people to wake up and start really looking at the world they let get built around them.  Another part of me is more skeptical of that possibility.  The SOPA/PIPA protest worked wonders, but it hasn't exactly been duplicated.

If we're looking for a smaller injustice, there's the case of Justin Carter.  He has become the poster boy for the insanity that has become our criminal justice system, for the kneejerk reactionary behavior that has come to define us since 9/11.  What was his heinous crime?  What did he do that he's being held on half a million dollars bail and has been behind bars waiting for trial for the last five months because his family can't put together the scratch?

He made a single Facebook post.

Let me start by saying that the post itself was just incredibly stupid.  It was a bit of trash talking from Carter to an opponent he knew from League of Legends.  As trash talk goes, threatening to shoot up a school and "eat their still, beating hearts" is neither terribly clever, nor does it really do a whole lot to demoralize an opponent that you already lost to a few minutes earlier.  It's an infantile expression of piddling outrage and poor sportsmanship.  It was written by a teenage jackass, probably to another teenage jackass, and ended with the utterly moronic "j/k", or "just kidding."  It should be beneath anybody's notice under virtually any circumstances.

Unfortunately for Carter, who lives in Texas, that infantile expression has landed him behind bars, in solitary confinement, and on suicide watch.  Why?  Because one Canadian busybody decided to completely ignore the parts of the message that didn't indicate anything other than a douchebag from LoL, tracked down where he was located based off his Facebook profile info, and called the local authorities.  The local (Texan) authorities then arrested Carter for making a terrorist threat and hauled him off to jail.  What's particularly stupefying about this is that the cops have attested they found no weapons, no bombs, nothing to indicate any sort of imminent threat, and they're STILL HOLDING HIM IN JAIL! 

Again, stupid post, stupid person.  Being reported by another stupid person to some incredibly stupid cops working for what has to be the stupidest legal jurisdiction in America.  Nobody is going to argue that school shootings aren't a problem or that preventing them doesn't require a degree of diligence.  Hell, I'd be the first one to admit that Newtown and Sandy Hook were flat out horrifying.  But even the most ambitious son of a bitch in the DA's office should have taken one look at this case and come to the conclusion that the State of Texas would save themselves a lot of time, money, and not just a little embarrassment if they quietly dropped it and sent the kid back home with a pointed hint of "Now stop being an asshole!"  Maybe one night in jail to scare the kid straight, but beyond that, no.  Instead, he's looking at eight to ten years of hard time.  For a stupid Facebook post.

You know that things have gone bad when people look at your nation, compare it to your avowed enemy, and think the other guy is better than you are.  While the Obama Administration is bleating about how necessary PRISM is and how anybody who disagrees with that "fact" is clearly a terrorist sympathizer, if not an outright apologist, recent elections in Iran have put a new President in place who seems to be a considerably different proposition from the yahoo that left.  It would be incredibly foolish to believe that Hassan Rouhani is a great admirer of the US who writes mash notes to Washington in his spare time.  But there's a world of difference between "not a great admirer" and "spiteful antagonistic dick."  So far, he's avoided the gratuitous insults and bellicose rhetoric of his predecessor.  More importantly, he's getting in front of cameras and going on Twitter and calling out elements of his government and his society and telling them they have to shape up.  Seriously, when the president-elect of a nation tells the state TV agency that it's avoiding its responsibility to provide important news and not just show baby pandas on TV, that's a big damned deal.  This is not Germany, or France, or Japan that we're talking about here.  This is Iran, the one nation that has been America's bete noir for the last thirty-odd years, and their new president (however bereft of real power he might be) is doing a better job of promoting freedom within his society than we are in ours.  I'm no more of an admirer of the Iranian government than the average Iranian is of the American government, and yet I'm quite happy to tip my hat to Mr. Rouhani, because he's doing it right.  And that should be motivating our own politicos to perhaps rethink their positions on a number of topics.

Lest anybody think I'm an alarmist, I will point out that America has not yet descended to the level of an Orwellian police state.  The fact that it's a lot closer to one now than it was ten years ago, or even fifteen years ago, should be something that any truly patriotic American must oppose with all possible vigor.  We have needed to purge ourselves of the poisons that we drank down so heedlessly after 9/11 for so long.  The cure we thought we were taking has proven so much worse than the disease, and we're still not cured.  I still believe that my country is great.  I still believe that it is worth fighting for, against all enemies foreign and domestic.  I believe that we as a country will look back on this time period in our history with a mix of embarrassment and humor, albeit a very black and caustic humor.  But that cannot start until we start pushing, hard and often, to roll back the grotesque parody of security that has come to characterize our nation.  It will be painful, but America has endured painful change before, and it will do so again, and it will be better for it.  And maybe one day, hopefully very soon, I can smile again when I watch the fireworks and can genuinely celebrate the Fourth of July.