Today, while on the bus reading Thomas Friedman’s, From Beirut to Jerusalem, I came to really appreciate what freedom we truly have as Americans. In the late 1980’s in Syria (yeah, not long ago), if you so much as looked at the government wrong it was enough to get you put on their “list”. Not like in our country though. In Hama, for example, it became so dire that the military performed raids in the night and took entire families out into the street and killed them. During an uprising from the Muslim Brotherhood they literally ended up running tanks through a few neighborhoods, followed by steamrollers. It wasn’t over differences of wealth, or differences of nation, or even major differences of belief.

I’m happy that I can open the paper and see open and willful dissent, several times with my own name at the bottom. It is this which our country is founded on, and these values that we should hold dearly. I just hope that we can all consider this the next time something our government does something that upsets us. Say something. It won’t hurt. Somebody might just listen. (please refrain from NSA jokes here ;))

This entry was posted Monday, January 23rd, 2006 at 9:48 pm and is filed under General, Opinions. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.