Where are we going?

There is a fairly well known speech by Martin Niemoller

THEY CAME FIRST for the Communists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.

THEN THEY CAME for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.

THEN THEY CAME for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.

THEN THEY CAME for me
and by that time no one was left to speak up."

I bring this up because I am a rather staunch Constitutionalist and I continue to be appalled at the American publics acceptance of the decision that it was okay to make people disappear. This is like a nightmare out of the Soviet Union of the 1960s. Yet people think it is just fine. The idea of a writ of habeus corpus dates back to the Magna Carta and is a cornerstone of the US Constitution. To decide that it doesn't apply to some people is unacceptable.

Why do I bring this up? Well, I was talking to a very upper middle class Black woman in her late 50s. Very nice lady, very intelligent (Mensa member), quite well educated and extremely liberal in her political leanings. She seemed to think it was just fine, because it would never apply to her. She was also quite happy with the idea of denying political dissidents the right to travel (it has happened, look it up) because it obviously would not affect her. Since she grew up in the days of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr., I am amazed that she now thinks that it is just fine for people just like the ones who fought for her equal rights to be denied the right to travel.

To build upon that, I wonder if she is familiar with the Supreme Court decision of the early 1960s that affirmed that people have the right of association. This case was based upon a lower court order for the NAACP to turn over their membership roles to law enforcement. The Supreme Court decided that it would have a chilling efffect on freedom of speech. From a modern standpoint the NAACP looks rather noncontroversial, but I lived through those years. I lived in the South and I can assure you that they were, at the very least, seriously rocking the political boat.

I still believe in those rights. For everyone. I believe that people and groups who I dislike intensely still have the right to exist, to meet and to express their opinions. Just because someone is named "Mohammed" doesn't give anyone else the right to prevent them from speaking and living and travelling freely.

There are bad people in the world, but I am more afraid of those who would take away my rights in the name of protecting me than I am of those who would attack me and my country.