Bring It On!

Why I Defend Civil Liberties So Adamantly

Several BIO debates recently have zeroed in on the topic of civil liberties and whether the full protection of our laws should remain in effect in the post-9/11 world, especially with non-citizens in general and Arabs and Moslems in particular.

Some people, who are motivated by a powerful and sincere love for America and desire to see our country effectively protected, argue that because of the things that Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups are doing, we should set aside the protections of the Constitution and other laws when it comes to treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo, detention of people based on their being Moslems or Arabs, and so on.

I agree with their goal, to see America kept as safe as possible, but their wish to set aside the rules that protect all of us scares me to the depths of my soul.

The reason for my fear is that history shows that when a government, or the majority, are allowed to act impulsively on their fears, they do, and terrible things happen, usually bit by bit. That is what happened in Nazi Germany. I’m not suggesting by any means that the people running our country now are like Nazis, and I’m not demonizing them; this is part of human nature.

Over the years I’ve been in some places that didn’t have the kind of “too-lenient” system we have, places where ordinary people hid from the police because they could be brutalized, shot, or disappeared on the impulse of someone official. I’ve helped dig buckshot out of the back of a fellow Marine who got shot (and luckily got away) simply for being on the street after curfew, no questions asked (this was in the Philippines under Marcos). I’ve talked with locals who had family members disappear. I’ve also read and studied a lot more history than anyone could experience in person. My grandfather was an insurance adjustor, so the Army drafted him in World War II and made him a war crimes investigator, and from my mom I heard the few stories that he had been willing to share afterward. I know the human capacity for evil, and I know it often starts with sincere good intentions, and I know where it too often leads, and I don’t ever want to see America go there, on our own soil or anywhere else in the world.

I’ve taken the liberty of reproducing here an excerpt from an excellent science fiction novel by a writer I really like, also a veteran, that does a much more eloquent job of depicting what I fear than I could do. This describes what I am afraid of; it was to protect against this that I spent 20 years in the Marines, because my oath was to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Please bear with me with the length of this. Also, please be aware that this excerpt may be disturbing – actually, I hope it will be for you as it is for me; but it’s graphic. And before anyone scoffs and says, “This could never happen here,” please consider that in many of the places it has happened and is happening, people said the same thing, until it did. The difference between us and them isn’t something magic in our genes or some additive in our drinking water (or Koolaid) – it’s in the way our society works, the structure that stands as a shield between us and the darkness that is part of human nature. We all have this in us. The way this kind of thing starts is with the setting aside of the protection of the law for some groups of people based on the perception that it’s a degree of leniency that we can’t afford or someone doesn’t deserve in whatever the current state of crisis may be. The door is opened for state-sanctioned discrimination, and that in turn opens it for politics and parties based on that discrimination, and it accelerates out of control.

Every time I read this it makes me cry, and I make a point of rereading it often enough to keep it fresh in my mind when I think about the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

When you read this, try mentally substituting “Arab” or “Moslem” or “non-citizen” for “black” or “Jew”, and “Patriot” for “White Paladin”.

Excerpt from Waiting for the Galactic Bus by Parke Godwin
(published in 1988 by Doubleday, NY, NY, ISBN 0-385-24635-8)
Charity Stovall, one of the book’s main characters, is in hiding from her ex-boyfriend, Roy Stride, a white supremacist who has taken leadership of a violent group called the White Paladins. This scene describes her awakening to the real meaning of what he stands for and the things she was so used to hearing him talk about.

The screen sprayed garish color and flickering shadows over the dark bedroom, resolving to a night scene with a telereporter’s voice-over –
“Just an hour ago the peace of these black and Jewish homes in a quiet neighborhood of Below Stairs was shattered by devastating White Paladin raids led personally by Roy Stride, new head of the Paladin party.”
Cut to Roy himself standing in an open car, leather-coated, whip in hand, black peaked cap perched at a cocky angle, and –
Cut to a black family being dragged from their front door by huge Paladin guards. Husband, wife, three children being hustled ungently toward a waiting van. When the father broke away and resisted, one guard simply shot him. The action was brutally graphic: two guards slammed the man up against the van and a third opened fire with a submachine gun. The gunfire went on and on, his body disintegrating in sharp detail and color.
“No . . .” Charity recoiled from the scene, tried to change channels. They were all the same but someone was playing tricks with the camera. The black man fell and fell with his head coming apart – and then Roy again, standing in the open car. He turned to Charity as the camera came in close, and looked directly at her, found her, his mouth twisted in a smirk of macho triumph and pride.
“Hey, Charity, that you? Where are you? Look: I told you how it would be.”
And once more the scene cut to another home, smoke and flame spurting from a shattered window, Paladins sprinting out of the front door. A man and woman lay crumpled on the front steps. The camera zoomed in on them. It looked to Charity as if someone had cut every artery in their bodies. You wouldn’t think there was that much blood in just two bodies.
“The general feeling in the political air,” the telereporter’s voice-over went on dispassionately, “is that these raids have the tacit assent of the white Christian populace.”
“Who said?” Charity blurted. “I didn’t.”
“ – Certainly no government troops or police have made any move to intervene, as though quietly allowing political force of gravity to take its course. This act is seen by some as a definite referendum. It is increasingly clear that the confidence of Below Stairs at large is with Roy Stride’s party rather than the Wembley administration.”
Only half listening, Charity couldn’t take her eyes from the bodies. Dummies, she thought. They look like doll-dummies sprayed with red paint.
“Charity!”
Roy again in huge close-up with that twisted grin. “Where are you? I told you how it would be.”
“NO!”
She jabbed desperately at the remote control but each channel was the same, not even a lag in the film. . .
“– how it would be.”
Charity screamed silently at the vicious grin on the screen. No, I didn’t believe you. I didn’t believe it would be like this –
– as the camera caught a little girl darting around the corner of the house, shrieking in terror. She turned to see the Paladin guard trotting after her, not even hurrying. The child ran blindly to the natural place, the bleeding sack of offal that had been her mother, screaming for help.
“My God,” Charity writhed. “Don’t hurt her. She’s just a baby. Don’t.”
The Paladin guard loomed over the tiny child as the camera came in tight on them –
“These Jewish homes were the first target,” the voice-over stated with no emotional color. “The black homes were hit a few minutes later in an apparently coordinated attack.”
Something was happening to the film. Somehow it went to slow motion as it focused tight on the face of the blond, blue-eyed child. Hypnotized with horror, Charity let the irrelevant thought skitter through her mind – I didn’t think Jews could be blond. But they could; she’d seen plenty that weren’t anywhere near the picture conjured up when somebody said Jew. She’d just never connected images, never thought beyond the stock picture. This little girl was very fair and –
Very familiar. More than familiar.
“Jesus, that’s –”
The child was her at age ten. She remembered the picture her new parents took when they adopted her, before her hair darkened to brown. But undeniably her in the picture, screaming for help from her dead mother.
And then not screaming at all.
The child looked up at the guard, mute. The only sound came from Charity herself, a wordless whine of empathic terror as the Paladin pointed his pistol at the tiny face. Her own child face but changed forever. More than horror in those wide eyes, a terrible knowledge that there was no help anywhere, no pity or escape. For those few slow-motion seconds, the child was not mad but her eyes knew madness, swallowed it whole and recognized it as the truth of existence. Knew it as her head disintegrated and spattered blood and brains over the twisted flesh bag of her mother, and –
Charity wanted to be sick and couldn’t . . . She fled to the bathroom to splash her face with cold water, but the bathroom screen was on as well – the same film repeating and repeating – Roy standing in the car, the camera zooming in on that dirty, mean grin of his that she hated – always hated it. Why didn’t I ever realize it then?
“– are you? Look! I told you how it would be.”
For the first time in her life, Charity Stovall snarled. “You get away from me. YOU GET AWAY FROM ME, YOU . . .”
She ran out of the bathroom and stumbled downstairs. As she hit the bottom step, all the screens went on – kitchen, living room, guest rooms; a repeating loop, the child running to the butchered sack of her mother, screaming in slow motion, then not screaming but looking up with Charity’s own eyes at the pistol barrel with that obscene knowledge in her eyes.
“– told you how it would be.”
“Stop. Stop, you son of a bitch.”
“– how it would be.”
Her instinct was to bury herself deep in the pillows of the sofa, blot out the sight and sound, but as the loop repeated, shorter and shorter now – Roy’s leer, the words, her own eyes staring not at death but at a sudden understanding of life – something else began to counterbalance the horror in Charity Stovall. The fruitless nausea passed, replaced by a wholly detached alien emotion more powerful than she’d ever felt. Detached, from a long distance, she turned her gaze back to the screen, to Roy’s gloating face and swaggering words, and the nightmare of her own violent child death.
That’s me could be me is me . . .
“– told you how it would be.”
Yes, you did, she thought, watching the screen from the depths of an icy calm. You sure as hell did, and I heard it and didn’t think about it.
Faster and faster the loop ran: Charity at ten, screaming, then no voice left to scream, only her own eyes lifting to the gun, knowing what a child shouldn’t have to know but so many did and had and would.
“– told you how it would be.”
Scream. Silence. Look up. Knowing.
Until at last the film froze on the eyes and their final recognition of horror. The child, with one second, one century, or an infinity to exist, would never again look on anything or anyone unshadowed by that terrible knowledge.
Obscene . . . I never used that word, always thought it meant dirty movies. But this is obscene. I could scream from now until the end of time, every dirty word I ever knew, they wouldn’t be as obscene or dirty as this. Not that you kill a child, but that you could put such a knowledge into her.
Now she knew the passion churning in her: rage – not from any wound to her but simply that humans could do that to children, take the brief innocence and stain it forever with the knowledge that there was no safe place anywhere ever. Forever or for a few seconds, children shouldn’t know that much about the world.
The gun didn’t kill her. She was dead when she looked up at him. Like some old people in Plattsville who came from Europe after we beat Germany. You could see that shadow of a gun barrel all their lives.
No music, love or joy would leach that shadow from the little girl’s eyes.
“– told you how it would be.”