That's a disgusting story, Suma. Reminds me of how I read Marx and Lenin as a freshman at college - as part of a political science course, prior to joining the State Department when our main rivals still relied on those works.
On top of that, when I was posted to Bosnia as an active diplomat with a top secret clearance, my bags were always pulled aside to be X-rayed at DFW (before all bags were like today) because I was flying back and forth to Bosnia a few times per year. This for someone traveling on a diplomatic passport.
When standards of reason are suspended, it is bad enough. When constitutional guarantees are also breached at will, it is worse.
And the fact that so many people really don't seem to care about their rights is equally depressing. We no longer have great men making speeches like this about liberty and freedom:
"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that "all men are created equal"
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of it, as a final resting place for those who died here, that the nation might live. This we may, in all propriety do. But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow, this ground -- The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have hallowed it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here; while it can never forget what they did here.
It is rather for us, the living, we here be dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that, from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here, gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve these dead shall not have died in vain; that the nation, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people by the people for the people, shall not perish from the earth. " |
