Something momentous will very likely happen this week, something ominous. So ominous that the kid that grew up reading mythology, medieval literature and fantasy, will somehow find it hard to believe if the sky doesn’t darken or the earth become sick as nature herself reproaches the nation for the wrongfulness of the path it has started down. I am referring to the potential signing of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). No one wants to hold up funding for the military, but it contains other provisions that are simply contrary to the very essence of the American nation’s soul. I get a lump in my throat and tight chest every time I think about this bill.
President Obama, once the hero of the narrative who came to office President Obama who “came into office pledging his dedication to the rule of law and to reversing the Bush-era policies” (Andrew Rosenthal, “Politics of Principle,” NYT, Dec. 15, 2011), is likely to sign the law making indefinite detention of American citizens a permanent fixture of American law. They will also be subject to military tribunals. Maybe we’re not quite at the point of using the Bill of Rights for toilet paper, but we’re at least using it as a dinner napkin.
I was 11 in 1976, the Bicentennial of US independence, and I was really caught up in the commemorations. I honestly think my first love was for the opening of the Declaration of Independence. I learned it by heart, with no compulsion what so ever from anyone, just a great deal of encouragement from my father and particularly my mother. I also memorized the Preamble of the Constitution and knew what was guaranteed by the Bill of Rights, because to me it was the most impressive thing I’d ever read. I also read books about the founding fathers, and when other kids were beginning to decorate their rooms with images of sports stars and rock legends, my mother was decorating mine with a Bicentennial theme. My celebrity heroes had been dead for a couple centuries.
My admiration never wained, not even as I learned about dark chapters in American history like slavery, the denial of civil rights to African Americans, the Japanese internment camps, the McCarthy Era, and other violations of civil rights large and small, that happened in spite of it. As Martin Luther King Jr. would argue in his most famous speech, I felt these were the growing pains of a nation struggling to live up to the words of its founders, even if they might not have fully realized the implications of what they wrote.
So how is it that now, at the end of 2011, our government is passing legislation by such an overwhelming margin that ignores language in the Bill of Rights? Didn’t this Congress come into session pledging to show uncharacteristic respect for it? Didn’t they start the session by reading it? I am outraged and so deeply saddened.
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This bill comes at the same time as a Senate Committee advanced the SOPA internet censorship bill. As you read about all this, ask yourself what would Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence containing that great statement that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with the inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness would say about the American people allowing their legislators to give up their rights on their behalf?
20 Things You Should Know about the Bill That Could Ruin America
President Obama Should Listen to the American People – Not His Advisors – on the NDAA