It is a simple question with perhaps a million or more answers. No matter how similar our answers may be or how diverse, it has become obvious that this is not the America of our birth. In our everyday life we push money through slots and take orders from machines.
The computers in our cars can be used as evidence against us in court as surveillance cameras watch our every move. This it is said, is for our protection, isn't it always for our own protection? It is the fear, that motivating fear, that fear that makes us shut up. I was coming home from Milwaukee Wisconsin when they pulled a man out of line at the airport for addition screening. This was an old and frail man, not a day under seventy and they pulled him from the line and patted him down as he held his hands up in the air and they ran the sniffer around his body.
It was an outrage to see anyone treated in such a fashion but to see an elderly man treated this way was outrageous obscenity in a so called "free country" to me. I could have said something, and I will regret to my dying day not saying anything, but I was on a business trip. I was flying with someone else and I had to get home and I had to be at work the next day. It was the fear of what could happen to me if I spoke out that shut me up. We were all travelers and the authorities knew that, they knew that we all had places to be, so they use the fear of delaying our trip to deny us our rights as Americans.
http://october2011.org/blogs/margaret-flowers/why-i-will-be-there-david-glenn-cox