Home of the brave?

October 18, 9:47 PMIndependent ExaminerBrian Trent

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Rationality and courage drowning in endless fear

Yesterday I received an email that must be shared. It was from a gentleman in Florida, and was in response to... I'm not sure what. I would love to find out it was a reply of sorts to my commentary on how neoconservatives are not conservatives, since the irony would be sublime.

Here goes:

"People like you make me sick you don't get that people are trying to kill us DO YOU GET THAT they want us to die. You should think of that the next time you talk they want to kill every man and woman. they are godless. If you had a brian you would understand why Americans are afriad and why they should be. If you still support Osama Obama then you have no idea what's in store for us but don't go crying when America has fallen to the people who WANT us to die."

It must be really sad, to live in such a state of paranoid, mortal terror every second of the day like that. Here's a man who has degenerated into the basement of human sentience. All he can muster is a flurry of unsubstantiated ad hominem attacks. All he can feel is blind hate and fear. All he can bathe in is pure, unadulterated ignorance.

By the way, all his spelling errors are intact. I particularly liked his suggestion that I should have a "brian." Does it matter if I am one?

So to him, and his other brothers-in-terror out there, here's my public response:

9-11-01 was a tragedy in which we should have stood firm and courageous. Instead, too many of us allowed this tragedy to be exploited by power-mongers in our own government. We let ourselves be raped. We handed over rights of habeas corpus with a whimper and a plea. We barked when the government told us to, we cowered in Pavlovian fright each time a new Terror Threat Level was flashed across our television screens.

I am not afraid.

My country defeated the tyranny of another King George — this one belonging to the British Empire –  when we were but scattered colonies in the wilderness. We defeated Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany. We can defeat today’s threats of jihad and homegrown terrorism without devolving into a police state, without becoming the very antithesis to freedom and civil liberty that we were founded upon. For it is these notions that form the spine of our founding document - the Constitution.

America can only be destroyed from within, not without. It isn’t gay marriage or pluralism that destroys us. It is the fear-addicts who tell us to surrender our rights to dissent, our rights to question, our demands for governmental accountability. It is these people who shame the memory of their proud ancestors by working hard to destroy America from within… systematically whittling away our protected rights. It is these cowards who will fork over their souls to a nanny-state self-perpetuating White House regime without hesitation.

Hypocrites. Cowards. Traitors.

Make no mistake that those in power are keenly aware of how easy we are to manipulate. They bang the drums and we squeal, “Protect us! Protect us!” They feed us a steady diet of feel-good platitudes because they know the real meal - reading our Bill of Rights - is something we don’t bother to stomach.

Shame.

When we’re attacked again, we need to stand strong and firm and fight, against those barbarians who hurt us and against those opportunistic politicians who will try to exploit the tragedy.

Don’t let others tell you what the Founding Fathers wrote. Read it for yourself, brush up on your history, and rediscover the bravery of your progenitors.

Before it’s too late, and the “land of the free/home of the brave” becomes a footnote filed under irony.