Ivory Tower

This dedication goes out to George W. Bush and the statists in his administration: “Got to Be Free,” by the Kinks.

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For as long as I can remember, pundits have said that people vote their pocketbooks. That isn’t necessarily the case, as we saw in the 2008 elections. Some things are worth more than money.

People place the ultimate value on their basic humanity, and the basic rights and freedoms that we all intrinsically know we deserve.

A case in point is the actions of farmers in the Ukraine after the Bolshevik Revolution. Upon being told that they could no longer sell the fruits of their labor, but that their harvests would be taken up by the state to be distributed among all the people, the farmers didn’t just refuse. They went out and spent the extra time, work and money to plow their fields under so that the new government couldn’t get a thing. Freedom-loving people everywhere cheered them on.

It was the principle of the thing, and I’m sure many of us would have done the same thing.

Most of the people who swept Barack Obama into the White House certainly weren’t under any illusions that he would lessen the strain of taxes on their household budgets. Democrats have long been known as the party that takes from the general public in order to give money and fund projects for the few people they consider deserving.

It didn’t help that the Bush administration wasn’t any more frugal just because the president belonged to the Republican Party. Still, Republican candidate John McCain promised change, and he’s pretty much been regarded as one of the straighter shooters in Congress. And Obama made no bones about his intentions to create even more expensive programs that will require even heavier taxation, such as universal health care.

What McCain couldn’t escape was the steady curtailment of individual rights under the Bush administration. We have to admit that our freedoms have been whittled away, by administrations of both parties, for more than a century and a half. But the acceleration of that curtailment the past eight years has been nothing short of revolutionary.

Who would have thought, as the millennium was beginning, that our own government would be fencing its residents in, at least along our southern border? Who would have expected the government would decide it could plant wiretaps and listen in on private conversations without having to justify itself in a court of law? Whoever thought that in the country that calls itself the bastion of freedom to the world, federal law would require banks to notify federal agents whenever any U.S. resident made a large deposit, regardless of personal history or lack of criminal record? Who expected that other laws would empower those federal agents to demand library records so they could examine individuals’ reading habits?

And it certainly didn’t help that Bush’s attorney general was a gutless lackey who’d rather defend this power grab than stand up for the basic human rights on which this country ostensibly was founded.

The worst part of it all is the attitude the outgoing administration displayed toward the public they promised to serve when they took office. At times the attitude was cavalier; sometimes it was outright contemptuous.

The president himself felt free to ignore any question he didn’t want to answer. The Homeland Security secretary brushed off questions about his border fence plans, saying people who didn’t agree with him should just grow up and shut up. Anyone who said something the vice president didn’t like faced the prospect of a curt, expletive-laden retort.

Heck, the veep even managed to shoot a guy in the face and pass it off as if it were a bogey at the 18th hole. Not only did he avoid any repercussions, the guy he shot actually apologized to him for the public uproar. Anybody else would have been brought up on charges of criminal negligence, no matter how much of an accident it was.

Unfortunately for McCain, the problem didn’t end with the Bush junta. The Republican Party has become known for supporting this kind of stuff, such as regulating who can and can’t marry; trying to dictate the teaching of science based on whether or not it can be reconciled to certain translations of the Bible; and defending executions to the point that when technological advances made it possible to offer more exculpatory evidence when people were wrongly convicted, they responded by accelerating the appeals process so people had less time to prove their innocence.

These aren’t pocketbook issues; they’re basic human rights issues. And that was the change a majority of voters deemed most necessary. Fighting higher taxes and even bigger government? We’ll deal with those on a case-by-case basis. But at least, many people many have decided, it will be better to address those issues with an administration that might be willing to listen.

 Carlos A. Rodriguez is opinion editor for The Brownsville Herald. His e-mail address is crodriguez@brownsvilleherald.com.