Like many people on Brown campus, I was very disappointed by the outcome of the election. However, I was not disappointed so much with the failure of John Kerry's campaign; his loss in the Electoral College and his concession didn't bother me in the least. My disappointment is with the America that has been projected by this election, the apparent consent that Americans have given to the Bush agenda and the implications for our country and for the world.
The most urgent issue in America today is not jobs, same-sex marriage, a woman's right to choose or even the war in Iraq. The most urgent issue is the state of our democracy. The current "security over liberty" trend we have been facing in this country is one that threatens democracy everywhere, and while this trend has been prevalent for years, nobody in recent memory has better embodied that trend than President George W. Bush.
As we have seen from the Abu Ghraib scandal, along with the torture and humiliation of British citizens recently released from Guantánamo Bay, torture and imprisonment at the hands of the American military and prison system is rampant. Under the Patriot Act, the executive branch now has the authority to "detain" anyone suspected of being a terrorist, without requiring any public justification or evidence. This places a great deal of power into the hands of a select few who have no obligation to answer to the people. Countless psychological experiments have revealed that these kinds of abuses happen constantly whenever one group of people is given a tremendous amount of unchecked power over another group.
The kind of power given to military personnel in Abu Ghraib is exactly what the Patriot Act has given to the Bush administration and intelligence officials, and it is producing a wealth of horrors too numerous to list. The systematic deportation of anyone seeking asylum in the United States (reminiscent of when the American government sent a boat full of refugees from the Holocaust back to Germany to be exterminated) and the mass detention of anyone thought to be threatening (reminiscent of the Japanese internment camps during World War II) immediately come to mind.
Along with the combined effects of a racist drug war and felon disenfranchisement in this country, our government is seeking to marginalize people of color, drug users, Muslims and political activists and prevent them from having any say in the political discourse of our country. These acts are not only horrors in and of themselves, but they are fundamental attacks on democracy. With the executive branch targeting political activists and critics of the government (which I have seen firsthand), it is evident why the system of checks and balances, which the Bush administration is effectively nullifying, were established in the first place.
All this, however, is not to imply that John Kerry would have solved any of these problems. Yet the fact that the American people would vote for President Bush, even after the atrocious attacks on democracy committed by his administration, shows that the American people are either not educated or not concerned about these issues.
It would not resonate with mainstream discourse on American politics to say that our government approaches fascism. Nevertheless, we should pay heed to Pastor Martin Niemoller's famous warning: "In Germany, first they came for the Jews and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew. Then they came for the Communists and I did not speak out because I was not a Communist. Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak out."
Mainstream America is not composed of the people who have seen these horrors firsthand - namely Arabs, Muslims, political activists, immigrants, drug users and the disenfranchised. But as Niemoller warned, and as past experience has shown, we must vigilantly defend the rights of everyone in order to defend ourselves.
Fokion Burgess '07 is probably a vegetarian.
