Responding to the War on our Rights Before it’s Too Late
by Michelle Chen

More pivotal than the congressional debates on the Patriot Act is the public dialogue about defending our rights and resisting abuse of authority—a discourse that has colored every social movement in recent history and must now be renewed with greater urgency than ever before. Legislative actions on civil liberties reveal a growing awareness among lawmakers that we have taken a drastic, possibly irreversible step backward. But nothing will be achieved unless society as a whole is conscious and vocal—not only about our rights, but also our responsibility to protect them from authoritarian power and bigotry. Three years after the anti-terror alarm became a death knell for liberty, countless lives have been wrecked by deportations, detentions, and presumption of guilt, with no progress in “national security” to show for it. If we do not rise against this injustice but instead surrender to fear, allowing our government to cripple the spirit of democracy—we’ll know where the greatest damage has been done.

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