The Fear Factor

from Michael Gene Sullivan's "Making a Killing" piece on Huffington Post

[...]

Sad, isn't it? This is what our citizens have been reduced to. Afraid to be seen at a show that questions this administration and the corporatocracy, fearful the people they know will turn against them for being exposed to something besides Fox News, scared their neighbors will see them as traitors for watching a play about governmental corruption.

This is the real effect of six years of the Patriot Act, and seven years of paranoid ineptitude at the highest levels. Fear of your fellow citizen. Fear of being identified as less than mindlessly loyal, fear of being identified by your friends as an Enemy of the State, a traitor, because you question authority. By even listening to someone point out the lies and transgressions of those who are undermining the very Constitution they swore to uphold you are somehow the renegade, and have changed from one of "us" to one of "them."

Centuries of struggling for civil rights, and we live in a country where people are scared to see a mime troupe.

Ladies and gentlemen, the terrorists have won.