The Chaff

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Friday, July 23rd, 2004

The Thin Red, White, and Blue Line

I haven’t been posting much lately, I know. Every time I think I have some witty idea that’s worth reading, I notice the crap that’s going on in the world, and I freeze up. My novel rewrite is way behind schedule; I owe choreography to two different groups, and I’ve lost count of the number of random lines littering my brain waiting to be turned into complete lyrics. I feel like I should be doing something more worthwhile, something useful, something to help somehow. But writing is what I know how to do. And I’ve come to realize that if I don’t give myself an outlet, my brain will explode.

So the Chaff isn’t going to be very witty for a while. It’s going to wax philosophical about politics and current events. I’m probably going to piss off some of my friends and alienate some of my family members. (On the up side, no one from work reads my blog, so I at least I shouldn’t have to worry about my job….)

So this is what is stuck in my craw this week:

My country has been imprisoning people indefinitely, without a trial.

This isn’t a fluke, or a glitch, or a stray person who slipped through the cracks. And it’s not about any of the accused people who can’t afford bail and are held in prison awaiting trial. This is an official policy of the Bush administration that people can be held indefinitely without being charged with a crime, without a chance to talk to a lawyer, without a hearing before any kind of court–military or civilian; many haven’t even been told why they are being held. Nearly 700 people have been held for years, isolated and incommunicado. And while most of them are foreign nationals , at least one is a US citizen. And then there’s the Canadian citizen arrested at a JFK airport and sent to Syria where he was tortured for 10 months.

And the worst part is that the government argued these cases all the way to the Supreme Court. It took the Supreme Court of the United States to say, “Hey, that due process thing in the Constitution? I think they really meant that.”

When I’m doing world-building, I spend a lot of time working on government types, trying to figure out what makes a government “good” or “bad.” And I have to say, tossing people in prison for the rest of their lives without any kind of day of court is one of things things that pretty much falls into the “bad” column. Isn’t that one of the issues that started the French Revolution?

Storm the Bastille, dammit. I want my country back.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 23rd, 2004 at 9:14 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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