In their book Millennials Rising, Bill Strauss and Neil Howe cautioned that our generation, the millennials, would be willing to forfeit our civil liberties in order to create order in society. They said that we would serve as a reaction to the disorder of our parents, the baby-boomers, and in a changing world we would always choose safety over freedom. And this was all before Sept. 11.
Many young people today have completely forgotten that there are civil liberties, and are so concerned about "the enemy" that they are willing to forfeit the freedoms that make America the strongest and most powerful country in the world.
We live in an age where students on college campuses across the country think that it is okay and necessary to racially profile Arab Americans because of the actions of a few Arabs. People seem to accept the notion that Arab prisoners of war do not deserve the same rights as Americans. Military tribunals have become the accepted norm, and few students on this and other campuses seem to be concerned that their the rights of Americans are being violated every day.
College students seem to think that they won't fall victim to these violations of civil liberties because they have done nothing wrong. We have forgotten that the reason civil liberties exist is to protect those who have done nothing wrong. We seem to have forgotten the gross ways that our country has trampled over the rights of the innocent. From Japanese internment camps to cointelpro to the McCarthy hearings our government has continually stomped on civil liberties and then tried to justify it.
Our generation, however, was not alive during these events, and the history books aren't enough to remind us of the pain and tortures that law abiding Americans have gone through in the name of "safety." We live in an age where most college students think that big brother is a failed television program and that our government will lead us through this time of crisis if we only let them do their job.
Well I do remember big brother, and after all of the gross violations I have seen in the past six months, I don't trust our government to protect me. Our government has been building a political machine trained and equipped to dupe the American people. And I don't take that lightly.
Recently it came out that the Department of Defense had created a new propaganda department whose purpose was to plant fake stories in media around the globe in order to trick people into agreeing with us. Congressmen and women have been lambasted for even thinking about questioning the administration's positions. Our National Security Advisor has called media organizations across the country to keep them from broadcasting news in the name of "safety."
Colleges and universities haven't been immune to this propaganda machine. Some professors who spoke out against the war have been pressured to lessen their comments or lose their job and University administrators have been told to lay down the law and keep "anti-American" professors from speaking their mind. Additionally, many Universities have unofficially banned speakers from coming to campus and speaking out against the war.
All this on top of the racial profiling that so clearly exists at our airports, the military tribunals that now exist in our justice department, and the disregard for the Geneva conventions with respect to prisoners of war.
This is not the America I love. This is an America that is running scared. This is a defensive paranoid America that appears to be neither free nor brave. If we allow the events of Sept. 11 to affect the freedoms that we used to hold so dear, then the terrorists have won. If this is truly a fight over the American way of life, then why are we so willing to give up these liberties?
What concerns me even more is the way in which younger Americans seem to have accepted these civil liberties violations. I am concerned that our generation will grow up paranoid and scared without a sense of freedom. I suggest every college student in America go out and read 1984, and learn the histories of the past abuses of our government. Our government is a great institution that we must look to for help in times of crisis. But our government is also an extremely powerful and manipulative force that must be viewed with great skepticism.
Ultimately it is we who will decide whether our generation will be focused on order, as Bill Strauss believes, or focused on freedom. These two choices represent a fundamental question of the American criminal justice system; is better to let a guilty man go free or to imprison an innocent man? Our system holds the freedoms of the innocent over justice to the guilty. I hope that we hold this principle and return the focus to civil liberties.
