We all have to take inspiration from Mr. Meyer’s example and do what is right despite our fears.
Courage is not the absence of fear. Courage is acting despite fear.
We all need to start taking more action, despite our fear, to regain the freedoms we have lost and to defend the rest, which remain threatened by authoritarians who take advantage of every tragedy and use the shock they create to push their own agendas.
This story and some Americans’ reactions to it are a strong example of how badly we are losing the battle of ideals against the authoritarians. They show how badly we are beaten down, how terrified, how demoralized and how pacified we all are that we not only sit by as a 21 year old kid is tortured into silence with a taser but that some of us actually defend that action instead of the student’s rights and freedoms.
People who believed they had to be quiet or polite when speaking to public officials about controversial politics did not create this country.
"If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen." - Samuel Adams, speech at the Philadelphia State House, August 1, 1776. Trying to convince them to join the American Revolution.
This goes especially for you Democrats in Congress.
Grow some balls.
As Dorothy Sayers once said, “If you don’t stand for something, you will fall for anything.” So far you have been falling for everything. The time to stop that is now.
This is your last chance. If you can find the time to condemn MoveOn.org for stating an opinion shared by a large portion of America then you damn well better be able to find time to condemn this immoral violation of a young citizen’s rights.
The founders only left us with one piece of advice in the case you continue to fail us.
“When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”
