Our Rights

by martinc54

Have you noticed the limits of free speech and in America? Our rights, set down by our founding fathers in the 1700s have been bitten away at. We can not say that we are f****ing stoned on television, or even in the newspaper. In school they teach children to be individuals and to be creative and to freely express themselves. How are you supposed to 'freely express' yourself if you aren't allowed to say what and how you feel? Everyone has to be able to express themselves, even in a lucid, crude, and obnoxious manner. And the government should not be able to force you to say the pledge of allegiance, god in it or not. I think it is every person's own decision to decide how they feel and if they want to sing about bombs bursting in air or not.

Then there is the right to keep and bear arms. This one I am MOST angry about. It has been told to us that it is our right to keep our own weapons. Now, you can?t have a gun without a permit, you have to be a certain age, you can't have certain guns (fully-auto fire guns, bazookas, etc.) Gun control has just caused bigger problems. It is possible for criminals to get their hands on weapons easier than law-abiding citizens, or even police officers, whose duty it is to protect. Do you feel safe that while the junkies on the street have fully-automatic Uzis up their sleeves, and you have nothing. I used to live in a very urbanized area of Massachusetts. Some people would call it a 'ghetto'. If I left the window open in my room, I could hear gunshots every night. Every few months there were major shootings, and innocent bystanders were killed. Many people are mugged every day by an armed attacker. I feel that every street-robber might reconsider if everyone carried an Mp-5 and a concealed switchblade longer than a tiny 3 inches.

Then there is a matter of personal privacy. Everyone deserves to be able to piss in the shower without having to see a tiny camera peeping on them. It's ludicrous, at the airport they go through your luggage, rearranging all of your belongings, on the border searching through your car. With all of this extra consumption of time, every year, it costs Americans billions, yes billions, of dollars. We would be much more productive if we didn?t have to go through numerous security checks and searches.

Well, I haven't totally covered all of the rights of Americans and other people all over the world. But now I will move on to another subject. It's about the necessity of some of the infringement of rights. Although some things that people do are unnecessary and wrong, others are done for more good than bad reasons. For example, the 9/11 attacks. I am sure that someone who is reading this article has been affected by this disaster. The security precautions and measures help to prevent these events from happening. For example, email reading, radio eavesdropping, telephone bugging, security searches, everything else that infringes on people?s rights, etc. I am sure that some law abiding citizens are very much against this kind of surveillance because we have done nothing wrong, though some think it is good because it protects them from the evils of other people. I am a mixture of both. When my rights are being infringed upon, I am furious, but when a terrorist or other criminal is captured due to this infringement, I won?t complain.

I hope what I have said you will take as truth, and with a grain of salt.