The Patriot Act is, as the name suggests, a measure which patriotic citizens should adore and whose only opponents can be the unpatriotic, the communists, and the socialists. Anyone who disagrees with the Act is just some fruit-looped, Birkenstocked, Greenpeace employed whackjob and there is no in-between... “with us or against us,” right? Yet I’ve been in-between, and until today, I pah-pahed the vociferous concerns of those who oppose the Act and discounted its scope and by virtue of silence endorsed its existence. I believed the Act would only present a problem to someone who already presented a problem, and that common citizens would not be within its reach. So yah, I might not agree with it in theory, but I didn’t worry about what new permissions its sprawling 800 pages gave the government, the FBI, the CIA. Guffaw, who’s it really going to impact; some long-bearded future terrorists living in San Diego? Who cares about their civil rights? I don’t have to worry about the books I check out of the library, for Christ’s sake. And so I am quite sad to have been edified, to have been lifted out of my comfortable Patriot Act fog to learn that indeed, normal, everyday citizens like us have already suffered the consequences of the civil liberties the Act stole away so loudly (it was not quietly at all). So many of us were so earnest and pure in our desires to ensure there was never, ever, another 9/11 ever, never, ever again that we’d have agreed to the passage of a law that adopted a mandatory Nazi solute to police or the construction of a Reichstag at Ground Zero. And so we got our Reichstag, and it is the Patriot Act. I truly hate to echo along with the idiot U of Colorado professor who called the 9/11 victims “Little Eichmanns." Nazi references are used so flippantly these days that using it as an analogy at all just makes people (rightfully) dismiss you as though you are a Holocaust-denying moron. But allow me to draw this parallel just for a second, before you hit the back button on your browser and go Googling or checking email. The Reichstag had been the seat of German politics as its Parliament for decades prior to its rise as the face and symbol of Nazi power. On February 27, 1933, the Reichstag was set on fire by arson; the fire was set in multiple places and an explosion followed which completely destroyed the building. A very likely mentally ill Communist party member from Holland was found behind the building during the blaze. Hitler used the fire to rouse anti-Communist sympathies. As Chancellor of Germany, he convinced the president to sign something called the Reichstag Fire Decree which effectively erased the human rights provisions of the Weimar Constitution written after World War I. He further convinced the president to activate the Enabling Act which enabled the government to pass laws by decree rather than by democratic process. I do not find it much of a stretch between how Hitler came to have so much power over Germany so quickly in those early days by virtue of the Reichstag fire and how we may have granted the FBI, the CIA, and Homeland Security (another innocuous-sounding but potentially malevolent government behemoth) powers that may endanger democracy in the long term by virtue of 9/11. I have often accused liberals of never thinking of the past or the future; Ann Coulter sums it up quite nicely with “For liberals, history began yesterday.” Yet it seems that Conservatives may be thinking in the same way, and with similar short-sightedness. Today, the US government and civil liberties will not vaporize with the Patriot Act--erode, but not vaporize. What about 100 years from now? Where will our liberties be if 800 pages more are added to this Act, and opponents are mocked by conservatives who firmly believe that we are not “safe” without it? How will Freedom of Speech, Freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, Freedom of the Press survive 1600, 2000, 2500 pages of “Patriot” Acts? I believe that they would not survive and I believe it is possible. Our tax code that would circle this planet 29 times if it were printed out in its entirety. That’s proof enough that bloated bureaucrats are more than capable of quickly writing a ton of laws in a short amount of time--the tax code is only about 100 years old. Conservatives are more than willing to point the Nazi finger when it suits them; the Nazis took away everyone’s guns before they rounded them up and murdered them, by Golly. Well now we find the conservatives are taking away our civil liberties and then rounding us up, by golly. I rarely admit I’m wrong; I rarely change my mind. But I never stop pursuing truth, logic, and liberty the way I believe it is defined not only by the US Constitution, but by the ideal we represent. We fall short of this ideal since we are human beings, and human beings can’t perfectly implement any social or democratic system; we’re too subject to those things that make us human—greed, passion, desires, jealousy—to make anything work perfectly. But as long as your eye is on the ideal, you can stay as close as humanly possible to the goal. If you turn away from the ideal as long as you think you have mitigating circumstances, anything goes. Such is the Patriot Act; an anything goes law created in shadow of the extraordinary events of 9/11, our mitigating circumstances. It has allowed the conservatives to let history begin on September 11, 2001. It allows us to think someone is insane at the suggestion that Bush has waylaid power and human rights like Hitler in 1933. But just as the Reichstag Fire Decree snowballed into the full blown Third Reich, the Patriot Act and its add-ons enables our government an excessive amount of power which will be the death of our Ideal; the United States, Land of the Free, Home of the Brave. Part II to follow tomorrow