WHAT FREEDOM?

According to the March Industrial Worker, USian employees are being fired for having blogs with contents their maters find objectionable. But this is only the latest in a series of attacks by the bosses on the supposedly Constitutionally-enshrined democratic rights. During the recent presidential election several people were fired for having Kerry bumper stickers. Then there was the case in Idaho a few years back of a man who lost his job for going to an environmentalist meeting. And just to show what authoritarian slime the Idaho Supreme Court was they backed this outrage. If a person can lose their job over something they do OUTSIDE the workplace, no less, their rights aren’t worth used toilet paper.

What century are they living in down there? Well, better not ask with a population 40% of whom think the universe is only 6000 years old. The only people who will now feel free to speak or write or go to meetings will be the wealthy. Seems they have regressed to feudalism, or the peon system once favored in Mexico, where one had to follow the views both temporal and spiritual of the hacendado or get a whipping.

What worries me is the possibility of this extremely anti-democratic notion moving Northward, as seemingly every authoritarian and socially-regressive aspect of the US system does these days. Yet, I am old enough to remember when what came up from the States was refreshing and liberating for stuffy Canada – rock ‘n roll, the Civil Rights Movement, hippies. That seems like another era now.