Yesterday a student at the University of Florida was tased at a John Kerry speaking event after he asked a series of long winded questions.   The student asked Senator Kerry some annoying questions, but after he refused to give up the microphone, he was then placed under arrest, and dragged off screaming by the police.  After being forced to the ground in view of dozens of cameras and spectators he was then shocked with 20,000 volts of a taser gun.  This may not have been John Kerry’s fault as he was heard, saying, “let me answer the question”, and didn’t ask for police intervention, but somehow the police got the idea that they needed to step in to stop the student from speaking.  As shocking as the video of the entire incident is, this is just one in a series of incidents of police using excessive force and of censorship of freedom of speech.  Earlier this year a student in California who refused to show his school ID because he felt it was a violation of his rights at the school Library was handcuffed and repeatedly tased until he was unable to walk.  

These are just some of the more violent incidents that occurred.  Last week during the Congressional hearings on Iraq, protestors who wore anti-war t-shirts were arrested, some of them tackled to the ground despite not posing any threat to anyone.  We may not agree with everything that people have to say, but we should fight for the right of people to be able to say it.  These incidents are just another example of how the American People are having their voices silenced.  This is not another conspiracy theory of how the big, bad government is trying to take away important rights; it is a harbinger of things to come if we don’t start standing up for our right to free speech.  If we don’t fight for it, we will lose it, and right now we all are on the losing side.  We are kicked out of political rallies for speaking our mind, we are removed from the halls of Congress for demanding that our national leaders do something about the war in Iraq, we are tased for asking tough questions of our leadership in Washington. 

 

During the Emmy’s last week, FOX censored Sally Field for saying, “lets face it, if the mothers ruled the world there would be no Goddamned wars in the first place.”  Audiences around the world saw her speech cut to a black screen for speaking her mind about the war.  This is not something new for FOX, but it does show the extent to which censorship has become a problem in American media.  What message are we sending when we censor people because some people might be offended by what is said.

 

So we have the media censoring people, the government censoring people, and we are moving closer to a police state where people who speak their minds are tased, arrested and put in jail.  I know that some will think I am over-reacting, but this is important.  When we lose our ability to speak out, to let our voices be heard, we will devolve into a third rate demagogy, where people are fearful to disagree with their government for fear of retribution.  It’s ironic that in the same period of time that we have attempted to spread our form of democracy around the world, we have slowly eroded our own democracy and the fundamental principles of it.   We no longer have the freedom to tell our elected representatives what we think; people are held without charges, without access to attorneys and without due process of law at Guantanamo.   We have our phone calls listened to and our library records seized without warrant.   

 

We are living in a very dangerous time in history, not only from terrorists, but from our own government and our media.  Fear has dominated our lives for the last 7 years.  September 11th has been used as a political tool to cast fear of the Middle East, we have been led into a war under false pretenses, we have been forced to give up our essential liberties for our “security”, and we are now giving up our collective voice and freedoms to speak out, all in the name of Fear.  It may not come in one sudden sweep but it’s a slow flush of our civil liberties.  If we don’t start fighting for our rights, and speaking up against the slow erosion of our First Amendment rights, we will lose them.   We know from history that when people entrust their government with too much power, there are inevitable abuses of power, and when a people allow for their rights to be infringed upon, eventually those rights are lost completely.  So make your voice heard, draw attention to the fact that we are losing our freedom of speech in this country, and never let anyone censor you.  We still do have the power to change this country, but we must use the rights we have to ensure that we always have the ability to change it.