2001 James Bauhaus

WE MADE IT!

. . . secrecy is the keystone of all tyranny.

                                                                                                                                                         Robert Heinlein

Years ago, in Junior High School, my barely post-pubescent friends and I used to debate the future of the politician's "cold war". We knew Russia was a tyrannical dic tatorship, its citizens brutalized daily by a vicious secret police who brooked no privacy, freedom, self-respect or pride.

We knew America was a paradise of freedom, democracy, opportunity and affluence.

 Russia was a nation of people who stood in long lines, hoping that their ruling elite hadn't stolen for themselves all the necessities of life. The way up the ladder from grinding poverty was to engage in black marketeering and to denounce neighbors and friends when they did. Police and soldiers steadily gained excess, undeserved privi lege, taken by force from the producing and working classes, just for helping prop up a corrupt regime.

Americans went on to college and fell backward into prosperity, which was every where. One man with one job could support, by himself, a family of four.

We noticed that the Russian police state had trouble making their farmers grow enough food. American merchants sold food to Russia and boasted that doing so sold democracy and capitalism.

We watched our police become less friendly and more secretive as they found their hiway to wealth was chasing drugs and filling prisons with slave labor.

Even our ignorant, seventh-grade minds could see Russian society slowly crack open like a wary flower as American society squeezed shut like a vice. We saw these trends work toward collision. Most of us agreed that George Orwell must have been some kind of genius to predict the demise of freedom so precisely from such a distance.   Nineteen-eighty-four neared. Russians were still locked in a police state only slightly less oppressive than in previous years. Americans were still somewhat free. Our politicians put dogs and police in our classrooms to search us for crime and drugs. Russians could vote, protest, and sometimes even escape their gov't.

The Iron Curtain fell. Our politicians took credit for this as they made walls spring up around our embassies and gov't buildings.

Russians are traveling everywhere, trying to generate business and stimulate free enterprise.

Americans are being constantly searched for crime while our attorney general shrieks "Those who protect the constitution and civil rights aid terrorists!"

American police pull secret searches of our homes, computers, phone records, library cards, cars, offices and lives. Our stores, schools and stadiums bristle with police cameras, recording and storing our faces in the most oppressive database ever created. They steal our DNA. They call every protest "terrorism".

The collision of competing gov'ts has occurred. The Russians careen toward free dom. Americans are flipping end over end toward Orwell's worst nightmare and beyond. Orwell's shade demands further prediction. It is of the evolution toward a two class society of rulers and the ruled. Twenty-eighty-four will see elite, anti terrorist police cloned out of our own backs who will ride us to work in the ultimate of serfdom combined with the ultimate of parasitism.