CARLTON FLETCHER: Sitting idly by as our freedoms are taken away

“Gotta get out of this life somehow, gotta be free, gotta be free now.”

— The Kinks

So, this is America.

We’ve become such a divided, partisan country, our elected and appointed officials make laws that suit their needs, never a concern about what the majority of the people feels is the best path. Just keep coming up with laws that fit within our narrow agenda and please usually a minority of the people just so that we — or, more specifically, the people who give us money — are satisfied.

It’s not a Republican or Democrat, liberal or conservative, left or right issue. It’s an everybody issue. They all do it.

And here’s what keeps me up at night, astonished at our nation’s gullibility: We keep re-electing these same partisan clowns over and over and over. And, believe it, these people are clowns. They perform for their benefactors — do silly tricks like disappearing laws that the overwhelming majority of Americans think are working just fine — so that they can force their often warped ideology on a nation of millions.

There are those who want to scrap the entire mess and start over. Let’s not try to “fix” the things that tear us apart, because fixing it might mean me giving up my assumed level of power to people who, because they look, think or act differently, do not deserve any kind of recession.

We have “learned and distinguished” Supreme Court justices who decide, hey, we have the power, let’s just take away rights that are fundamental to our democracy. It felt good to tell women what they can and can’t do with their bodies — we criminalized medical procedures! — so let’s take it a step further. Let’s take control of contraceptives; that should teach all those smarty-pantses who want to do icky stuff all the time.

That’s not enough, though. Let’s be the arbiters who decide what is permissible sexual activity, who can have sex with whom, and let’s determine what groups are allowed to couple and marry with what other groups.

I get it that there are people who, perhaps for religious or ideological beliefs, are opposed to some rights that others believe are justifiable in a free society. And I also know that we Americans, in general, are greedy and think things should always be the way we personally want them, no matter what others might think.

But we’re setting a dangerous precedent when we just sigh and say, “Oh, well, now we can’t” … do whatever anymore. When we sit idly by and let people who overstep their duty of legislating the will of the people for a select few or for personal preference, we are on our way to losing those rights on which our country was founded.

Of course, when we bastardize those rights, say interpret the right to bear arms and support a militia into “the right to own and use automatic weapons that can kill a whole lot of people,” again at the urging of a very small minority of the people in this country and again allowing corrupt politicians to curry favor with groups that line their pockets with money, we lose a little bit more of the spirit that made this country great. We lose another little bit of our soul.

We sit in our little homes, comfortable despite the rumblings going on around us, and we watch these things come to pass and just shake our heads. But we have plenty of food on the table, we have a job and we can pay our bills. So we continue to “let it slide.”

Sorry, summer soldiers and sunshine patriots, letting things slide is not going to be enough. If we don’t start taking action — the most immediate being voting out these cretins who are working hard to take away our freedoms and rights so that they, their buddies and especially their benefactors can have things the way they want them — we’re going to allow our individual rights to slide off into the sunset, stolen from us as we were warm and cozy in our little homes.