Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community - View Single Post - Resistance to the 'Patriot Act' in the Heartland

samremy · 11-20-2003, 10:07 PM

I found this article from Newsweek quite interesting, especially the manner in which the citizens of Geuda Springs, Kansas are reacting to the 'Patriot Act'. Resistance to the Patriot Act is growing in the American heartland <--Link!

Quote:

Common Sense

Newsweek Web Exclusive

Geuda Springs is a little town in southern Kansas, not too far from the Oklahoma border. About 200 decent, proud and sometimes kind of ornery people live there, and, precisely because they're so independent-minded there's a whiff of outlaw about the reputation of the place. Earlier this month, just to raise some eyebrows, the Geuda Springs town council passed an ordinance requiring every head of family to own a gun, and ammunition, and be ready to use it.

I WAS TRAVELING through the area, hoping to get a firsthand sense of what people in the American heartland were thinking about the war on terror, generally, and the war in Iraq, particularly, and I figured I'd go straight to God's own gun-toting country, Geuda Springs, to check it out. What I found there was not what I expected. If the administration believes folks like these are buying the official line from Washington, it had better take another look. They're thinking long and hard about the way this war is being waged and what it means to their own ferocious sense of freedom.

First stop, the one-room post office. Taped to the counter was a clip from the Ponca City, Okla., newspaper (just across the state line) showing a local boy manning a checkpoint in Baghdad. He was wounded a couple of weeks ago, but returned to duty. "I don't talk to the media," said the postmistress, who was tired already of the local TV crews attracted to Geuda Springs by the gun ordinance. But she pointed me toward a couple of people who would talk, she said.

Nathan Cook, 29, was just pulling out the driveway of his pristine doublewide home with a white picket fence. We talked for a few minutes about the gun ordinance, which he'd voted against on the town council. His main objection was the lawyers' fees the just-about-bankrupt little community might incur if it has to defend the ordinance against a legal challenge. He figured about 99 per cent of the folks in Geuda Springs have got guns anyway. And then I asked him about the war in Iraq.

"There's a lot of people here that are touched in some way," said Cook. "The majority of this town are related." Somebody gets sent over there to Iraq, somebody gets wounded or, God forbid, killed, and everybody feels it. He mentioned the kid in the Ponca City paper.

"I was in the military for five years," said Cook, who works now at the GE plant over in Arkansas City, Kans. He enlisted in the Army when he was 18, he said, and served as a medic on rescue helicopters. His wife stood by listening in the driveway and his kids peered at us from the back seat of his pickup. Cook took the dark lenses off the front of his glasses, so we'd make eye contact, I figured. "This war sucks," he said, and looked over at his family. "If I were running the country I'd be taking care of my own people."

What should have been done in Iraq? "Our technology is so far superior to anyone else in the world," said Cook, "I don't see why we couldn't have made that place a parking lot and started from scratch." If we weren't going to do that, he said, he wasn't sure what we were doing there. "It really does upset me to see anybody lose their life over this. Hell, we're still chasing ghosts in Afghanistan! We are spread so thin. We may have a problem protecting our own home town some day if we get so spread out."

Up at the other end of town, near the grain elevators, in the County Line Café, a couple of the local boys were flipping through a catalog of knives, some bird hunters were just finishing up lunch and Philip Russell, 51, a big, bearded biker who owns a Harley shop down the street, was flipping burgers to help out his wife, Debra, who runs the place. I asked Russell what he thought about the war in Iraq.

"Better to be killing over there than getting killed here," he said, which I took to mean he supported the administration. But when we talked about the gotta-have-a-gun ordinance, I realized I was wrong. Russell supported it, he said, because he wanted to provoke people, make them question this whole idea that government can mandate what you do in a nation that's supposed to be free. And when Russell started talking about the Patriot Act and associated laws rushed through Congress after September 11, 2001, everybody in the café started listening, and nodding. The Federal government can strip you of all your legal rights, he said: the right to legal council, to an appearance in court, even to be informed what it is you're charged with. "How do we know they're not going to use that against us?" said Debra Russell, and she phoned John Brewer, who wrote the ordinance, to come talk to me about all this.

A couple of minutes later a heavyset man with white hair pulled back in a ponytail and a devilishly well-trimmed beard came through the door. Brewer, 53, a retired railroad worker, said there were lots of reasons to have an ordinance like that in a town like this, not least the fact there's no police force because the city can't afford one, and the sheriff's office is on the other side of the county. But, yeah, he said, the ordinance was supposed to make a point. "It's one more stumbling block for people who'd like to take our guns away," he said. "The Patriot Act, as far as I can see, is violating just about every right we got," said Brewer. "You know, about the only right we've got left is firearms."

Now there's a cautionary thought. This is, after all, not so far from Timothy McVeigh country. And I don't know of any other town in the U.S. that's taken quite this approach. But when it comes to the Patriot Act, there's no doubt a lot of the heartland is, figuratively, up in arms.

More than 200 cities and counties across the country, and the state legislatures of Hawaii, Alaska and Vermont have adopted resolutions criticizing the Patriot Act. In Nevada last week, protests drew liberals, conservatives, Hispanics, libertarians, gay activists--a spectrum so wide, and so deep in the heart of the U.S.A., you'd think Washington would be listening. But so far, there's no sign it is. Justice Department spokesmen just keep insisting the Patriot Act is vital in the fight against terror, and thus really assures the life and the liberties it might seem to infringe. Sounds like the same Orwellian logic that tells the administration things are getting better all the time in Iraq.

Crazy as the ornery politics of Geuda Springs might seem, especially to folks outside the United States, I think there's a great lesson here. No matter how much the tornadolike spin machine in Washington tries to convince them that white is black and black is white, the American people have enormous faith in their own common sense, and in their ability to work for change, and any government that ignores that does so at its peril.

© 2003 Newsweek, Inc.