A CALL TO ACTION

By: Jake Gates

During his recent trip to Auschwitz, Vice President Dick Cheney said "...evil is real and must be called by its name and must be confronted."

He couldn't be more right.

And if liberty, democracy and peace are the measure of what is good, then the greatest evil our country faces right now waits not in the sun-fried desert of the Middle East, but behind a desk in the Oval Office. There is no need to waste ink on listing the president's abuses. They are plain enough.

We are in the midst not of a secret conspiracy, but an open one, in which we are all complicit if we do not act.

In light of the brazen nature of these unending assaults on our civil liberties, the rights of sovereign nations, the health of our world, and the moral fabric of our great country, we would be wise to examine not only what we have suffered, but how we have allowed the administration to perpetrate these evils.

First, we relinquished the free press. Our forefathers, in their extraordinary wisdom, built our government on a system of checks and balances. Likewise, they gave us the freedom of press, so that the media might act as a check on the power of the government and the rich and powerful. With the unprecedented consolidation of media outlets in the hands of a few huge corporations, that "check" has disappeared.

The media, being owned by huge companies, have the interests of those companies in mind. The big companies, needing the favor of the government, have the interest of their favorite politicians in mind. The media will defend themselves by saying "we are still fair and unbiased. There's no proof that we have suppressed any conspiracies." Which is true, to a point.

They may not have suppressed anything. But they have certainly manipulated Americans into accepting the conspiracy as prudent policy - FOX news, anyone? And in this "instant gratification" media age, they also slice, dice and omit information until even the hardest news story goes down as easy as a fruit smoothie. If we are to take back America, we must break up the huge media conglomerates.

Like our forefathers before us, fate has called upon us to overcome the abuses of a tyrant.
We won't have much help, either. The big-business media conglomerates aren't very interested in "calling a spade a spade" when it comes to the Bush administration. The simple explanation is that Bush is for big business. And for anyone who's thinking of doing it in the future, there's always Dan Rather's the majority of Americans don't have time to seek out the truth