Reply #7: "Papieren, bitte!" [View All]

[vickitulsa]

From the article:

When I was in Europe I was proud to be recognized as being an American. Now, when Americans go overseas, our own State Department says not to draw attention to the fact that you are an American. Many savvy travelers have learned to tell people that they are Canadian. I have Canadians themselves write to me by commenting on my blog and telling me that they are afraid of the United States nowadays. Why? Is it because in May of 2008 all American citizens will have "Real ID" that will be merged with our driver's license? That this ID will have tons of information on it that lets any policeman know everything about you. Isn't that a bit like Nazi Germany during the war, when the Gestapo would come up to a fellow German and ask for their "papers"? Do we need to carry papers in our own country? Why do we need a passport to go to Canada or Mexico? I thought that we were protecting ourselves from terrorism. It sounds like the government wants to know where we are going and what we are doing. Excuse me, but I'm not a terrorist.

I watched that TV series "Heroes" for only the second time last night, and apparently we had been moved forward five years into the future, after a massive bombing of NYC had reduced it to rubble, killing millions.

As I listened to the speechifying of the evil President, talking about how strict and drastic laws had been made due to the "danger" of the "special ones," I couldn't help but think some writer was trying to point a finger at the current administration, bigtime.

It isn't the first time, for sure, that certain select entertainment offerings have done this, but that was surely the most glaring bit of paralleling I've seen yet.

I hope Americans wake up before it's too late, and we're all left to wonder how we got to here from where we were. Living in constant fear, trembling with anxiety when we have to produce our "papers" for the Gestapo -- er, excuse me, the cops whose job it is to protect us -- is NOT what this country was supposed to be all about.

It's true that our history is replete with abuses and persecutions of "others," including the peoples who lived in this land when the Europeans first arrived on its shores. But I don't think anyone ever dreamed we could have stooped as low as our leaders are doing now.

Thirty-two years after the U.S. made its last humiliating, mad scramble to evacuate our embassy in Vietnam, we don't want to think about what it's going to look like when we finally give up the farcical lies about Afghanistan and Iraq and pull our troops out of there....


The world is right and justified in blaming us for horrors our government has perpetrated on "others" that we're still trying to blame for everything that's wrong with the United States of America.

"Paperien, bitte!"