Excerpt
Small Liberties
A Short Story by Amber Lea Starfire, ©2007
We were complacent when our tax money was poured into war-making technologies. Large corporations got larger and somewhere, hidden away from mass view, fat men got fatter – and richer. Wars bloomed in one country after another. It was always our military that was bombing, pillaging, and bringing “good government” to the poor masses. We starved them systematically, while blaming their dictators or their “undemocratically elected” presidents. Then, we would use our military might to redeem them. I guess redemption means sending them to heaven, because we killed many of them. And those we didn’t kill were left to finish starving.
At first, our lives didn’t change much. Small liberties were taken away daily in our courts of law. It became legal for our government to listen to our conversations, to detain us indefinitely without representation, and to keep us from speaking out. But the majority of us didn’t notice.
Our lives went on as usual, and we were impervious to the actual ravages of war. We thought we were underprivileged if we didn’t have Internet access! What appeared on our television screens was believed to be fact. After all, that is what we had been taught was the role of our news organizations. Given our constant indoctrination since early childhood, can you really blame us for what happened next? ...