The Administration is going after antiwar protestors in Iowa to silence all opponents to the Iraq War.
John Greeley
When President Bush was asked what the election in November will be about, he replied, "Who can properly use American power in a way to make the world a better place."
Just how George Bush intends to make the world a better place can be seen in, of all places, Des Moines, Iowa, home of Drake University.
"In what may be the first subpoena of its kind in decades," writes Ryan J. Foley of the Associated Press, "...a federal judge has ordered a university to turn over records about a gathering of anti-war activists."
"In addition to the subpoena of Drake University," Foley continues, "subpoenas were served this past week on four of the activists who attended a Nov. 15 forum at the school, ordering them to appear before a grand jury Tuesday, the protesters said. Federal prosecutors refuse to comment on the subpoenas."
It is now time for Americans to pay for trading their individual rights for a false sense of governmental security. The bill for allowing our fears to supercede our constitutional freedoms is now due and the first installment will be paid by antiwar protesters.
We teach our college students to ask questions, sometimes disquieting ones, about who we are as a people and what we should be doing with our lives. It is not unusual for them to rock the establishment boat. But after what students were able to accomplish during the Vietnam War, the Bush Administration is sensitive to what protesting students can accomplish today.
In the better world Bush wants to create, protest is deemed unpatriotic because, after all, he is a Christian man with a good heart who is doing what is best for America. So the best way to dampen youthful ardor and to warn off those others who might be ready to join the protest, the power of the subpoena is there, waiting for them. Fear of prosecution is an excellent way to insure a docile electorate, even an exuberantly youthful college-age one.
Thus, in the improbable bastion of Middle America begins the real fight of our lives. It's not in Iraq or Saudi Arabia that we could lose a war, it is in Des Moines, Iowa, for what is at stake is our ability to be free. We can certainly defeat an ideology called "Fundamentalist Islam." An ideology which represses women the way it does and calls all non-believers infidels and goes so far as to ban them from even visiting its holy places for fear of contamination can surely be defeated, and the fiercest weapon to use is our openness. What is much harder to defeat is the kind of repression which looks and acts like our kind of freedom but calls itself security first. Conformity to the party line is not freedom, especially when the penalty for not doing so is prosecution in a court of law. |
