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Thanks to all the activists whom I imagine are behind these revelations--the unsung, the all-night workers, the pourers-over documents til their eyes bleed, the volunteers, the patriots, the passionate, the committed, the true-blue! I love you all!
When I was a kid it was a common American joke to mock the Nazis for their obsession with numbering everybody and demanding that people "show their papers." Big time comedians used it. Numerous two-bit comedians kept using it. ("Vhere arr yore papahs, mein herr?!") Even my brothers used it. It was the signature of the Nazi regime to several generations of children. It always meant evil, and was sometimes accompanied by the Nazi salute, and other references.
The implication--which no child could miss--is that we don't do that in America. In America, we are free. We do not have to show our "papers" upon the demand of uniformed or other authorities. We are who we are. Human beings and American citizens. And if the "authorities" don't like it, they can try to prove that we are somebody else, without our help.
That, to me, is America--more than any other item you could name. Even voting. Kids didn't know much about voting. But we could identify with not having something on our persons, that adults demanded of us. Our schoolbooks. Our homework. Change from the store. Clean fingernails. And we'd seen "Casablanca" and all the old movies, in which the personal identification papers that the Nazis were forever demanding, and collecting, and confiscating, and collating, and filing and shuffling, and checking--and the papers that the good guys were forced to forge, falsify, steal and copy--were the difference between life and death. Not having your "papers in order" meant death. But HAVING your "papers in order" might also mean death--if you were a Jew or a resister.
I've learned since that IBM collaborated with the Nazis in all that paper work--the kind of thing they didn't tell kids (or even adults).
I hate it. First they turn you into numbers. Then they harass you unmercifully with demands for ID everywhere you go--in stores, at airports, in hospitals, at what used to be free borders, at work, every time you apply for anything from government or private corporations, you have to remember or produce strings of numbers that are "you." Then the looting and the real harassment begin. And the danger begins--already realized in some cases--say, of innocent people finding themselves on "no fly" lists; or somebody's credit ruined in secret reports; or names in the wrong zip codes wiped off voter lists; or, my 90 year old mother, having been a U.S.citizen for 89 years, having been on Social Security and Medicare for many years, having voted in every election, having raised 7 American citizen kids, suddenly having to prove her citizenship AGAIN, in order to STAY ON Medicare. You become a "number" to the government, and soon you are a victim of the government. Then, some night, the FBI shows up at your door, and whisks these numbers that are "you" away, and you become zero. Non-human. A perp with no rights.
Some people are more used to the "papers" thing than others--having been born later. Me, I remember those jokes--that it was the bad guys who demanded to see your "papers," and that people who are forced to produce "papers" and to constantly have to prove who they are, are not free, and are, indeed, in great danger. I don't know what can be done about it. I'm just saying. I remember what being an American was supposed to mean. Not being Nazis.
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