My partner A. met with a financial planner the other day and came home in a foul mood. I was thinking that the idea of retirement should make her happy, it sure makes me happy, but she continued to frown and rant. When I was finally over the moodiness, I asked her what was really bothering her. She told me that thinking about retirement used to be easy, but that today there is too much uncertainty. No one knows what sort of conditions will exist next year, and we're talking 20 more years until I've got the bank to quit work. But my steady partner A. dropped the biggest bomb of all. She said she wasn't sure she even wanted to retire in this country.
A. is a pretty centered person, and come to think of it, so am I. I've thought seriously in the last two years about having some liquid assets on hand, in case the need ever arose when I might think it wise to leave the country in a hurry. I've never given it more than a few moments thought, but the idea always sort of hovers in the back of my mind. My partner, who works for the federal government is in a better position to judge which way the wind is blowing, and to hear her voice my secret fears out loud is disturbing and makes me wonder if those secret fears might be more than a passing paranoia.
But if you think about it, I mean really think about the last ten years and the rise of the Republican Machine, what chance do Americans have now of surviving the tide of disaster that is coming? Any balance of power that we might have had in our young history has been finally and irrevocably erased with the confirmation of Justice Alito. As we enter our next election year with hopes of recovering a two party system of governing, we face in every branch of government chances that the staus quo will continue indefinitely. If you think about the places we would never have gone as a nation, we've already been there and done that. Is there something worse than torture? Holding POW's indefinitely in prisons beyond any hope of due process? Is there something worse than indiscriminate spying on American citizens without a legal paper trail? Or an Administration that justifies any of these heinous un-American acts as a necessity in wartime? Have we sold our morals for comfort and safety, or merely been too busy or ignorant of current events to object to these crimes committed in the name of every American? What could possibly be next? A happy ending? Or something worse?
If you picked B, you would be correct, keep your passport and a hefty amount of cash in your nightstand, and you might just win the prize of being able to leave the country before we build the detention centers.
Part of the new budget for Homeland Security has 400 million earmarked for temporary detention centers. And guess who's going to build them? None other that our favorite subsidiary of Halliburton, KBR. If you are wondering why America needs to build detention centers in the Land of the Free, you may think about the recent arrest of the mother of a dead soldier incarcerated for the crime of wearing a T-shirt. If you're a Muslim and your name is Akbar, you'd better be really afraid, even if you were born here. Or you might want to worry if you happen to be of Latin descent, there are plenty of crazy Americans who want to shoot you for taking jobs like bussing tables and mowing lawns away from American citizens. Or maybe you're just one of the 65 percent of regular Americans who are against the war in Iraq, and would like to exercise your constitutional right to organize and protest. Or maybe you're me, gay, proud, and not about to be silent.
Once the detention center is built, and there is no objection to it, it is a done deal, we've been there and done that, we have sold our liberties never believing that it could possibly come to this, that all of that left wing screaming about fascism and the Bill of Rights would ever be relevant to the reality of today. It is distasteful to compare Americans to Nazis, after all, detention centers are not concentration camps. But how much further down the road must we travel, past torture, past lying, past censorship, past eavesdropping, to the point where we go willingly on the bus to the detention center? That time may be coming soon, or maybe Superman will fly in at the last moment and save America.
Hey, I'm all for Superman, but just in case he can't find a phone booth, I'm keeping my passport in the nightstand.
