National Defense Authorization Act
Related Content
Brandon Navarrete, Opinions Editor
February 9, 2012
Filed under Opinions
In December 2011, the National Defense Authorization Act was passed. This act will effectively let the military incarcerate without charges and deny the right to habeas corpus, the right to a trial and jury, to anyone they please including American citizens. Essentially, the government just made our Bill of Rights, which our forefathers made to protect us from a tyrannical government, obsolete. When this act was passed I expected everyone to be in an uproar about this, I expected to look out the window and see cars being flipped over but no, no one rioted, no one even so much as held up a sign protesting this.
It seems to me that Americans are growing increasingly more and more apathetic about their civil liberties as their being continuously eroded away. No one seems to care that they could be imprisoned for the rest of their life without a trial if the military sees you as a threat. The only time I’ve seen my generation take up a cause was when their precious internet was threatened when Congress considered passing the SOPA bill. You know our priorities as a society are horribly skewed when our ability to sign in to Facebook is more important than our Bill of Rights.
America is steadily becoming a police state that is fighting an endless “War on Terror” that require more and more of our liberties taken away in exchange for “safety.” The course that this country is headed in right could end up in a future not unlike George Orwell’s dystopian classic 1984. But this future America is not set in stone, if Americans as a whole put their foot down and stand up to the tyranny before it’s to late they have the potential to change our society. The world we live in is changing faster than ever as our technology gets more and more advanced, the ability for the government to constantly monitor us is becoming a reality so remember as founding father James Madison once said, “If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.”