I don't usually bother to write about this sort of stuff, because it can get annoying when everyone you know on Facebook posts about Occupy Whatever and riot police this, and everything else. I'm not really interested in being annoying, and most of the stuff I see feels pretty reactionary. Most of my friends over there lean pretty liberal and many of the blog posts or news stories they relate come from liberal-leaning websites, as opposed to the presumed objectivity of mainstream news sources. I know that that last bit is horseshit, and that there's really no such thing as objectivity. Anyway, I don't usually write about such things because it seems to me that if anyone is going to write about them with any kind of clarity, it takes time to digest each action and think carefully about all of the details, etc. Like, for example, the First Amendment gives citizens the right to peacefully assemble to address grievances. But that doesn't give people the right to camp wherever the fuck they feel like it. Like my wife (a lawyer) said, "Just because you have the right to free speech, that doesn't mean you can yell 'Fire!' in a movie theater." Simple analogy, yes, but it's telling.

But I am choosing to write about a couple recent things that scare the crap out of me: The New York Times reporting on journalists being kept from the removal of Occupy protests and in some cases arrested, and the Bill passed in the Senate that would give the armed forces the power to detain American citizens suspected of terrorism without due process. And just to be fair, I've not only included the NYT and Huffington Post reporting on these phenomena; here is Fox News and a Fox News affiliate reporting on the same (you can read that the rhetoric is slightly different, too). So, Obama says that he would veto this Bill should it come before him. He says that. Still, it's disturbing that such a bill should even be considered in Congress. And it's distressing to think that local law enforcement would try to suppress the dissemination of information to the public.

I asked my wife at what point we might seriously consider leaving the United States. And of course, since my wife's smart, she said, "And go where?" My response is always Canada, and my wife asks what we would do for work and I say we'd get jobs at Taco Bell, but I don't know if Canadians eat corporate Americanized Mexican food. She says that things could go pretty far and the US might still be best the best place on the planet for us to live. The reality of that is even more distressing than these vague possibilities raised above. Okay, the cops in NYC might have tried to suppress the press's right to cover the news, but we have processes in place for taking care of such transgressions; and because of our checks and balances the president could easily put down a proposal to lock up our own citizens without charging them for a crime. But what really scares me is that these things could come to pass, and there's nothing, really, that my wife and I can do about it. Congress cannot decide what to do about our debt, to say nothing of high and lofty political ideals like the Bill of Rights. So voting isn't really an option. Since we have our two-party system, and it's unrealistic that Independents or Libertarians or Communists, or anyone else, might take a seat in Congress, that leaves Democrats and Republicans posturing and never getting anything accomplished. So attempting to affect change via writing to my Congressperson or voting someone else in is moot. What really scares me is the lack of the freedom of choice. My wife and I cannot simply decide that this "democracy" is no longer democratic enough for us, and we'd like to go somewhere where it's supposed to be democratic, and perhaps not so imperial, like France, or Canada, or Britain. We couldn't get citizenship elsewhere, nor jobs so that we could feed our family. So what's really scary is that things could go to complete shit in the US, and if my wife and I are stuck here, then there are hundreds of millions of Americans stuck even deeper than we are (I mean, between the two of us we speak three languages, and my wife has already lived abroad for many years). That sense of being stuck is the ultimate end of freedom.

The other day someone I know on Facebook posted that she could not sleep and found the cable for her television out of whack, and in the doldrums of 3 AM was left with no resort but to watch a movie on the DVD player. I was tempted (but did not) comment: "There are these amazing things called 'books,' and for some, while they are extremely interesting, informative, and entertaining, they also work as sleep aids." Admittedly, this Facebook friend (I should probably say "friend" with the quotation marks, because, while I went to elementary school with this person, we have not seen each other face-to-face in at least seventeen years, and we are not "friends" in the truest sense of the word) doesn't run with the literary crowd I associate with, is not a writer and--demonstrably not a reader--which, of course is fine (in fact I champion such freedom of choice), but still: why not just read something, anything? I don't think that in this person's case there was an aversion to reading, or a distaste for it; I don't think reading even popped into this person's mind as an option. That, right there, folks is where we're at. I say all this and I saw this person's Facebook status update on no other place but Facebook, when I was "reading" the newsfeed, and instead should've been reading a book. So, yes, it would be hypocritical of me to be judgmental. But let me say that I'm not trying to pass judgment, but am simply pointing out the possibility that the idea of reading (and I mean really reading, like reading a book) is for the majority not a part of the contemporary American's cultural DNA. Let me add that, while the freedom of choice to be a reader or not is one that I hold dear, for a democracy to function it's important to have voting individuals capable of understanding the basics of rhetoric. So again, I'll just say: that's where we're at. Preposition ending that sentence, and four sentences prior to that sentence. And that last sentence wasn't a sentence. It was a fragment. But that last sentence, the one before this sentence (which is truly the last sentence), the one about a sentence fragment, was a complete independent clause.

Oh, and Happy Thanksgiving.

I'm at the combination pizza hut and taco bell and everytime I try to type "hut" I automatically type "hit" and that tells you something about modern american architecture.