John W. Whitehead, Constitutional Attorney

We owe it to those who lost their lives on 9/11 and in the war-filled years since to do more than offer up amorphous patriotic tributes to their courage. Rather, let this anniversary be a wake-up call to a sleeping nation to rouse ourselves from a spirit of complacency and take our government leaders to task for eschewing the core values contained within the Bill of Rights.

Twelve years after the world as we knew it came to a sudden end, we find ourselves charting hostile territory. While we were distracted by military carnage overseas and color-coded terror alert systems here at home, the economy has crumbled at the hands of corporate oligarchs, reckless bankers and a national debt escalating due to the costs of endless wars, pork-barrel spending and a lack of fiscal restraint. Corporations continue to rake in profits and benefit from taxpayer-funded bailouts, while middle- and working-class Americans struggle to make ends meet. Our government leaders, gridlocked by partisan politics and the endless quest to get re-elected, have altogether failed in their duty to represent us and our vital interests. Our military, tasked with policing America’s global military empire, has been stretched to the breaking point. The police presence in America has exploded, with unconstitutional and brutal police tactics increasingly condoned by the courts. The right to be considered innocent until proven guilty has been usurped by a new norm in which all citizens are suspects in a surveillance state. And the right to travel has been subjected to draconian security measures that fail to make us safer.

Sadly, whatever success America has had in routing out terrorists over the past 12 years has been overshadowed by a society in which suspicion, fear and ignorance are the new norms. We have made enemies of one another. We allow government agents to pat-down our children when we want to ride in an airplane. We stand by when transit authorities shut off cell phone service in order to disrupt protests. We shrug our shoulders over the thousands of SWAT team raids that take place every year, comforted in the fact that it’s not happening in “our” community.

Enough is enough. We owe it to those who lost their lives on 9/11 to stand strong for freedom, today and everyday, and the place to start is by taking taking back control of our government and reclaiming our lost liberties. — John W. Whitehead, author of A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State