Fingerprints

So the other day I signed up to drive on one of my daughter's field trips. In order to drive on the trip, I had to go to the court house and get fingerprinted. So now the FBI (or whoever) has my fingerprints. Not that I have anything to hide -- in fact, my friend Patsy used to say that I am the only person she knows who could ever run for office because my background is so squeaky clean.

But it is the fear of the slippery-slope that worries me. I just agreed to give up a fairly big chunk of my privacy in order to gain "security" for my daughter and her fellow first-graders. I can't help but hear Bush's words echoing in my ears: we need to tap your phones without anybody's permission so that we can make you safer. That argument just does not sit well with me. It smacks of the kinds of things I imagine Hitler telling German citizens in the late 1930's: just trust me with more and more power/information so that I can protect you.

This security argument is just too convenient, y'know. Suddenly, when Bush gets caught, he's all about protecting us from terrorists. But instead of looking for BinLaden, Bush is throwing trillions of dollars into his pet invasion of Iraq. How is that protecting us anyway? It isn't. The Iraq travesty is just putting us further in debt and making more people in the world mad at us. So, in some twisted Orwellian logic, Bush has put us at greater danger by invading Iraq, and now--to "protect" us from that danger, he's spying on Americans.

What's next? Sending the fingerprints of honest parents to the FBI . . .

What the hell is happening in our country and what can us little guys do about it?