I wrote this on my FB after sharing Ron's post.
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I cannot help but be a little saddened that the American people are FINALLY protesting something LOUDLY and PROUDLY (SOPA and PIPA). Where were these protests when we lost the fourth amendment? When Obama signed NDAA into law? When Bush 43 passed the Patriot Act? When we bombed millions of brown people over the world? Nowhere to truly be seen. But once the internet was involved, people finally started fighting for their rights! I guess the first amendment rights are more valuable to them than their fourth amendment rights.
One thing is for sure. If SOPA and PIPA pass, I GUARANTEE you that there will never be another Ron Paul or anybody like him. The corporate media blacked out Ron Paul in 2008, and few people knew who he really was or truly understood his positions. Yet he succeeded in growing the freedom movement over the last four years anyway, and it is all thanks to the internet. If THEY get control of the internet, they can start shutting down websites that do not comply with the new law. The ease of information sharing that we all enjoy today will dramatically go away, and this is the first step to the United States enforcing the Internet the way China does with their citizens.
And now this time, when we all protest in the streets as SOPA or PIPA passes, the government can deem us as terrorists who are inciting violence against the government. This will allow them, thanks to NDAA, to arrest us without due process of the law and we will not be afforded the rights to an attorney or told what our charges were.
Please remember that the people in Germany in 1931 did not realize that by giving Hitler and the Nazi party all these new powers in exchange for more security promised to them by the government. Then the next thing they knew, they woke up in a country that they did not recognize anymore, and Nazi Germany eventually led to the second World War, which killed millions and millions of people in addition to the holocaust.
This time around, history may end up viewing the United States as the bad guys, as the country whose citizens were too blinded by the NFL, American Idol, and movies to care about what was happening in politics. Things are going downhill very fast. This is why we Ron Paul supporters are very passionate about what we are doing.
I warn you, my non-political friends, that if you don't "do" politics, politics will almost certainly "do" you. And I remind you Deaf folks that a government powerful and big enough to give us everything we want is also powerful and big enough to take it all away. A government-funded research program 20 years from now may find that it is too expensive to treat Deaf people with interpreters, FCC video relay services, and special Deaf schools. The proposed solutions may include implanting all deaf babies at birth by whatever government health care program is in place, regardless of whether the parents agree with the decision or not. And when that happens, I will laugh in your face and remind you of how important Ron Paul was. /end rant
