A couple of weeks ago, the UW-Eau Claire’s chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists and a litany of other sponsors put on a First Amendment Free Food event. By most accounts, this event was widely successful. A host of students shuffled through the make-believe realm of “Freelandia,” at which point they surrendered their freedoms in exchange for a free lunch. While this event was obviously well attended, and volunteers were passionate and talented, allow me, for a moment, to rue the lost opportunity to inculcate a real respect for the civil liberties.
The general idea of the free-food event was to raise awareness of students’ First Amendment rights by stripping those very same students of them. So what went wrong? For one, I’m not sure that the proper lesson was imparted. A couple of students who I spoke with said they came away with a newfound respect for the United States and the rights we are guaranteed. While this is certainly an admirable view, it was not what I believe the goal of the event should have been.
By setting the lunch in an imaginary realm with a bearded and fatigue-clad “dictator” (who, in full disclosure, is my roommate), the tacit lesson imparted was “look how bad it is to live under a military junta,” not a lesson on the dangers of stripping away civil liberties in a representative democracy. The shirts worn by volunteers, which had a Communist sickle and hammer logo on them, further reinforced the idea that rights are only forfeited in other countries.
One need look only as far as Arizona to see how easy it is to strip liberties away from citizens right here in the U.S. A bill recently passed along party lines gives authorities extraordinary powers to search and detain people based on “reasonable suspicion” of being an illegal immigrant. What is reasonable suspicion? Well, here’s a hint: it usually starts with brown skin.
While Republicans are behind the draconian Arizona law, Democrats are far from innocent bystanders in the attack on civil liberties. The “liberal” administration of Barack Obama has maintained the Bush-era policies of warrantless wiretapping, indefinite detention, and former Democratic Vice Presidential candidate (and 2004 Presidential primary candidate) Joe Lieberman has recently suggested any Americans suspected of terrorism should be stripped of their U.S. citizenship.
This all follows a pattern of the prolonged erosion of civil rights in this country. In the past 10 years the U.S. has, unapologetically, committed acts of torture; it has seen the power of the executive grow to allow the president to declare U.S. citizens “enemy combatants,” thus eliminating their rights to due process; the right to privacy has been attacked by a host of government agencies with auspicious-sounding names; and, of course, religious freedom has been challenged as religion continues to creep into the public sphere.
These are not issues which require participants to be whisked away to some imaginary land; they occur daily, right here in the U.S. The free-food festival had a chance to start a serious discussion on these and other challenges but passed, choosing instead to sanitize its own message into a banal declaration of the evils of oppression in “Freelandia.” It is my genuine hope that this event will continue annually and will, in future installments, hone its focus on the difficult and divisive issues facing Americans.
Hawkins is a senior world politics major, president of UW-Eau Claire’s American Civil Liberties Union and guest columnist for The Spectator.
