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Today, the ACLU is calling attention to the Constitution and the need to protect it. Obviously now is a very important time to consider our civil liberties, since November will see the election of a new group of Congresscritters and of course a new President. Seeing what I saw in St. Paul, though, with an excessively militarized police arresting anyone who uttered dissent makes me think that 'protecting the Constitution' is not a useful phrase. Glenn Greenwald asks if the Constitution is a historic relic, and it's a reasonable question, considering the open torture and lawless surveillance going on at the highest level of government (and no doubt the privacy violations by our commercial friends).
Of course, the Constitution isn't a quaint representation of some wonderful time of yore, it is a living document that must be refreshed from time to time with our willingness to recreate rights against an oppressive conservative movement aided by the quislings who shout for civil liberties but are unwilling to pay any price or even consider challenging their favorite politicians to add richness to their words. It was the so called 'liberal' Oliver Wendell Holmes, for instance, who wrote the Supreme Court decision sending Eugene Debs to jail for speaking out against US involvement in World War I. Another way to look at it is that we've been in dire straights before and come back brighter than ever; the ACLU is one such reaction built as an institutional reaction to that great war.
So we have to restore our civil liberties, using, as we saw in St Paul, our own words, actions, and bodies if necessary. That's how every generation of Americans did it before us and it's how we'll do it again.
Our electoral process is a start. Letters to the editor and to Congress are a start. Blogging is a start. Ultimately, the massive forces arrayed against civil liberties, including the huge sums of money designed to suppress free speech and spy on all of us in the name of Bush's war on terror, will need to be confronted with creativity, innovation, and resolve.
And that's how we'll restore the Constitution.
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