We need to put the brakes on, and we need to do it NOW.

There are those on the right who accuse us liberals of having the Henny Penny “the sky is falling” attitude. They would contend that many of us on the left are alarmists, and always paint the bleakest picture. And while there have been occasions where that assessment had a certain amount of validity; this is not one of them. The picture is bleak. The glass is much less than half full. And the sky most certainly IS falling.

Yesterday, a federal judge in New York ruled that the government could detain non-citizens purely on the basis of their race, religion, or country of origin, and hold them indefinitely without explanation. Can you think of anything as patently un-American as this? You would have thought we would have learned the error of our ways after the Japanese internment camps of WWII.

We are at the top of a very slippery slope right now, and the Republicans apparently want to hit the gas, not the brakes. The Legislative and Judicial braches of the government, in apparent lockstep with the Executive, continue to whittle away at any vestiges of civil liberties and Constitutional freedoms. Merrily we go barreling down the hill, heading straight for the totalitarian state that Orwell envisioned.

Am I exaggerating? Am I being an alarmist? I don’t think so. Perhaps one could draw that conclusion if we weren’t seeing a pattern here, a progressive attack upon the freedoms we have all taken for granted for far too long. Wiretapping and data mining. Corporate complicity in turning over citizen’s private information. Abdication of oversight responsibilities by our elected representatives. Increasing levels of secrecy and deceit on the part of the administration. Profiling and targeting based on race, religion, ethnicity, and ideology rather than probable cause. Need I say more?

America, we need to put a stop to this, and we need to do it right now. We need to show up the fascists who are running the show for what they are. We need to get our friends, our neighbors, our families and our countrymen to take up the cry “No more!” And we need to join together as Americans, and take back our nation.