Wow! Someone takes issue with “My Life?”

By Erich Kuerschner

I am always troubled when I hear admonitions that someone’s values and views being so important and self-righteous that those who hold different views are mocked with the ultimate put-down – to get a life! Such was the thrust of an Oct. 31 “My Turn” entitled “Pleeeeease-Give it up and get a life!”

While I respect the right of individuals to think as they wish, I also want younger people to know that at least one adult strongly disagrees with such a view, and that they can count on my support to not be bullied from expressing their views and feelings.

I happen to be one who feels that the topic of NSA spying is of VITAL importance. However, to contrast to the author’s stand, I recommend reading Teju Cole’s article in the Atlantic, “The White Savior Industrial Complex” for a more far and wide than near and narrow.

Whereas her realpolitik suggests that a conversation about the costs and benefits of spying – especially spying on your friends- is beneath discussion for decent society, it is bereft of the authors “White Savior” experience and perspective. It deserves a longer rebuttal. That everyone does it (actually they don’t), and those friends spied upon “have always liked it and accepted it” is nonsense.
One does not simply accept the evils that have been with us – murder (whether as an individual act or cloaked under cover of bugles and wrapped in a flag), torture, slavery – that Government behavior must simply be accepted and there is no such thing as fighting oppression and exploitation.

The oped argues that it is not enough that private individuals stop discussing the NSA- and the Edward Snowden revelations, but the press should also exhibit self-restraint and voluntarily stop reporting on the topic (lest the “government” be forced to step in and control the news that “they” judge the public is allowed to hear.)

As Frank Church (of the Church Committee investigating the Nixon spying efforts) stated in an interview with Mike Wallace on August 17, 1975, when the NSA posed merely a fraction of the threat to privacy it poses today with UPSTREAM, PRISM, and thousands of other collection and data-mining programs:

“If this government ever became a tyrant, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology.”

Perhaps some believe it to be too late to combat the tyranny that masquerades as ‘our government”, where there is NO correlation between what the people want and what their “elected representatives” enact as legislation. Or feel that the public is simply too stupid to participate in self-government?

I, however, refuse to concede that government should be the domain of the privileged, and like Sophie and Hans Scholl [The White Rose Society”] “I will not be silent”.

I also take the following words of Martin Luther King to heart, that it is NEVER too late to fight oppression:

“He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it”
 “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about the things that matter”
 “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”

In the words of Stewart Udall [NM Sen. Udall’s father [from a NY Times 8 June 1993 article] , who felt (as I do) that it was the Manhattan Project that is the root of the current government obsession with information control:

“There is nothing comparable in our history to the deceit and the lying that took place as a matter of official Government policy in order to protect this industry. Nothing was going to stop them and they were willing to kill our own people.”

“The atomic weapons race and the secrecy surrounding it crushed American democracy. It induced us to conduct Government according to lies. It distorted justice. It undermined American morality. Until the cold war, our country stood for something.”

Erich Kuerschner has been a resident of Taos County since 1985. cell 575.770.3338