You wake up early one morning and begin your daily routine before work. You shuffle into the bathroom in a trance and toss water over your groggy eyes before draining your bodily wastes in the toilet. You then head into the kitchen and begin cooking yourself a hearty breakfast before you head off to your 9-5 job when suddenly you hear a knock at your front door. You slowly head towards it, confused at who would be visiting at such an hour. You are greeted by three men in very nice suits who inform you that you must come with them. Your monotonous life is about to take a turn. A turn towards something you never thought could ever happen in the United States of a America.

You are taken to a large, official looking building and thrown into a tiny room. The men begin questioning you. They begin accusing you of acts you never committed. When you try to tell them this they tell you to shut up and answer their fucking questions. You can't understand what is happening. Hour after hour you try to convince them that what they are accusing you of is false. Then one of the men leaves. He returns to the room after a few minutes and tells the other two men that the President of the United States just gave them permission to torture you until you tell them what you want. No trial, no chance of defending yourself, and it's all perfectly legal. And the worst part of it is: you never did anything truly wrong. Maybe you are a homosexual, maybe you are an atheist, or maybe you are someone who speaks out against this crooked government. However, you never did anything to warrant an arrest and certainly not something as horrific as torture. For you were just practicing your rights, the rights you have as a citizen of the United States of America.

This sounds like some bad sci-fi movie that tells us of a future in which we have no rights. It's not. The House has passed a new bill that would make accusations without evidence enough grounds to torture a human being who is suspected of being a terrorist or supporting terrorists. This will probably become law and if it does no minority will be safe. This bill will inevitably lead to American citizens who have ideals that are not popular with the majority being arrested because of false accusations made by conservatives who are afraid of things they don't consider to be "right." If you are arrested and falsely accused under such circumstances, the only thing that stands between you and torture is a phone call to the President of the United States of America, George W. Bush. Under this new bill if President Bush gives the arresting party permission to torture you it, the torture session becomes legal and protected by United States law.

This is sad and it is evil. For over two hundred years the United States of America has been a nation of freedom. It's citizens have had the right to hold any beliefs and ideals they wants without fear of prosecution by the federal government. A citizen could choose to practice any religious belief without having death waved in their face for not practicing the most popular religion of the land and yet God is being shoved down our throats. Our freedoms are slowly being stripped away from us by a government that truly is evil. They give us bullshit reasons about how these new measures are protecting us and that some of our freedoms must be taken away in the name of safety. This is country is no longer the America I was taught about in school. This country is becoming a place in which a person can no longer be who they really are without fear of their government. If things keep going the way they are, if more bills and laws like the one mentioned here are passed, this country will slip from it's mighty pedestal of freedom and into a time warp that stops in a place that echoes the worst regime of 20th century.