When we think about America today, it is almost impossible to imagine that at the time of our nation’s founding our forefathers endured a tyranny no less malevolent than that of even the most Orwellian of examples. It isn’t until one reads the Bill of Rights, and truly considers the conditions that would give rise to the need for a group to stand forth and claim such inalienable rights as to be secure in their persons, houses, and effects, to be not deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, to enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial by an impartial jury, that one begins to fathom the extent of their oppression. Even upon such mental exercise, it is difficult to imagine such conditions could ever exist here, for this is America, the freest nation in the world, and such immutable rights are simply assumed, as they are the very definition of freedom.
It seems unlikely then that any American would sacrifice these rights, for which so much has already been sacrificed, or that anything could ever infringe upon them, but unfortunately that is not the case. The comfortable mind has a short memory, and the sacrifices of others do not long affect its workings nor weigh heavily upon it. Contentment transcends conviction; temporal security supersedes some lofty ideal. At least such was the demonstration by our Senate when in 2012, under the inauspicious aegis that without these rights there exists some nation worth defending, it imbued the National Defense Authorization Act with language that allows for the indefinite detainment of any individual considered a threat to the very rights they have thereby suspended.
What is the purpose of a national defense that fails to defend the very precept of freedom that has historically distinguished the United States from the rest of the world? It can only be the defense of elite interest and the privilege that attends it.