What does a terrorist eat?

Does he prefer the chicken or the fish? Does he require a low-sodium meal? Does he ask for orange juice, diet soda or a bloody mary? Does he ask for a second bag of nuts? Does he like to sit in a window seat to watch the mountains go by beneath him? Does he try to engage his neighbor, who is obviously trying to read, in conversation? Does he read a Grisham novel or the in-flight magazine? Does he ask the flight attendant for aspirin because of the screaming kid in the row behind him who won't stop kicking his chair? Does he use the air sickness bag? Does he giggle at the stupid Jim Belushi sitcom rerun they show in flight? Does he try to convince his girlfriend to meet him in the lavatory so they can join the "mile-high club"?

The fightening thing is that Homeland Security thinks that questions like these have answers. Worse, they believe they know the answers. They are so confident in their expertise that think they can assign you a score based on, among many other things, which meal you order on the flight and this score tells them whether or not you are a terrorist. Your score is so useful that Homeland Security intends to keep it on file for forty years and so accurate that there is no need to let you know it has ever been assigned to you or to let you challenge it in a courtroom.

Of course, we all know that the middle-aged Caucasian Southern Baptist from Arkansas will never be given a high score, despite his connections with a group responsible for shooting a doctor in Houston because she has performed abortions and burning down a gay bar in Atlanta with many patrons still inside. Instead, an Iranian man, a physician who has been honored for his volunteer work at a pediatric burn unit in his community, a married father of four with pro-Western sympathies, will switch seats on a flight from Paris to Boston because another passenger has had four cocktails and has become obnoxious. This innocent move will cause his arrest and detention by Homeland Security upon arrival at his destination because he just happened to move to a seat above the wing. He will never see an attorney or a judge. He will never know why he is being detained or tortured. He will never see his family again because he thinks the only way to end the torture is to confess to something he never did. They will never know what happened to him. All because he committed the crime of FWM - Flying While Muslim.

I would laugh at the irony of this, except it isn't funny. The real story here isn't the arrogance of federal officials who think they can apply a mathematical formula to expose terrorists; it's the fact that Americans have remained complacent while their nation gradually turned into a fascist state. We were all taught it could never happen here because of our precious Constitution. We have now learned the hard way that our civil rights are like potted plants: they shrivel up and die if they aren't nurtured. After 9/11, we were duped into believing that we needed to temporarily give up some rights so our government could protect us. Then, they said it wasn't enough; we needed to give them more power to protect us. By the time we got wise to the ruse, we had already allowed the passage of the Patriot Act and the Military Commissions Act. These two laws, more than any other, have gutted the Constitution.

It seems, though, that we may have stopped it in time. We still have the right to vote and we exercised that right a few weeks ago by affecting regime change at home. Had voter turnout been much lower, perhaps we would have lost the power to elect our representatives in government, too. There but for the grace of God, indeed.

Now we, as Americans, have the responsibility of keeping the Democratic majorities in the House and the Senate on their toes. We must remind them frequently that we want our civil rights back. We mustn't get complacent and trust someone blindly just because he or she has a 'D' by their name. After all, many Democrats have been complicit in the attacks on our Constitution over the past five years. Many are already working to reverse the erosion on our civil liberties, but they will need all the help the can get. Help them by writing to commend them when they defend the Constitution and criticize them when they fail to protect it. Help them by calling for the resignation of any Democrat found to be corrupt, even when you have supported them in the past. Help them by making them work for you. Otherwise, the Democratic Party won't be able to improve anything. I don't want to see the country's power divided between two parties that aren't different at all, because that would by the last nail in the coffin.