John W. Whitehead
“Why should anyone trust a government that has condoned torture, spied on at least 35 world leaders, supports indefinite detention, places bugs in thousands of computers all over the world, kills innocent people with drone attacks, promotes the post office to log mail for law enforcement agencies and arbitrarily authorizes targeted assassinations? Or, for that matter, a president that instituted the Insider Threat Program, which was designed to get government employees to spy on each other and ‘turn themselves and others in for failing to report breaches,’ which includes ‘any unauthorized disclosure of anything, not just classified materials.’” – Professor Henry Giroux
Why should anyone trust a government that kills, maims, tortures, lies, spies, cheats, and treats its own citizens like criminals? For that matter, why should anyone trust a government utterly lacking in transparency, whose actions give rise to more troubling questions than satisfactory answers, and whose domestic policies are dictated more by paranoia than need?
Unfortunately, “we the people” have become so trusting, so gullible, so easily distracted, so out-of-touch, so compliant and so indoctrinated on the idea that our government will always do the right thing by us that we have ignored the warning signs all around us, or at least failed to recognize them as potential red flags.
As I point out in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, the consequences of this failure on both our parts–the citizenry’s and the government’s–to do our due diligence in asking the right questions, demanding satisfactory answers, and holding our government officials accountable to respecting our rights and abiding by the rule of law has pushed us to the brink of a nearly intolerable state of affairs. Intolerable, at least, to those who remember what it was like to live in a place where freedom, due process and representative government actually meant something. (Remember that the people of Stalin’s Soviet Union and Hitler’s Germany also failed to ask questions, demand answers, and hold their government officials accountable until it was too late, and we know how that turned out.)
There’s certainly no shortage of issues about which we should be asking questions of our government representatives, demanding truthful answers, and subsequently insisting on changes within our government. Keep in mind, however, that the government has mastered the art of evasion. Thus, it’s not enough to ask the questions. We need to demand answers, and when those answers aren’t forthcoming–either because a government official claims to not “know” or because it’s outside his or her jurisdiction–we need to demand that they find out.