Game Over

My fellow Americans, we're screwed. The National Defense Authorization Act allowing the military to detain American citizens captured on American soil indefinitely, sans trial, sans lawyer, sans evidence, sans anything, has passed the House. And Obama has backed away from his threat of a veto; looks like he'll sign it into law. So much for the oath to defend the constitution of the United States. So much for the "land of the free."

Every good thing I once believed about my country is dead. We invade other countries on false pretenses. We torture people. We molest innocent citizens whose only "crime" is wishing to travel within the borders of their own country. And soon we'll start disappearing our own people, on the word of an anonymous tipster with a grudge.

I should've listened to the guidance counselor who urged me to become a doctor. Not that I have any interest in medicine, but if I were a physician, I could emigrate the fuck out of here. Instead, I'm trapped in a country where anyone suspected of terrorism can be made to disappear, and where anyone who protests in considered to engage in "low-level terrorism."

I don't enjoy contemplating my own mortality, but I always figured I'd either die of natural causes or (if unlucky) in an accident. Now it looks like I might very well die in some filthy secret military prison, after a bureaucrat decides some op-ed I wrote for the Guardian or what have you qualifies me as a threat to the commonweal.