Yet even in this group of committed people, one woman stood up during the question-and-answer session and said, "I want to get involved in writing emails to members of Congress urging them to cut off funding for the war and other things, but if I do that won't I end up getting put on a 'watch list'" or something?"Don't think of this as merely selfishly self imposing your own sense of Fear and Terror upon yourself.
I told her the short answer was yes, she probably would. In George Bush's and Dick Cheney's America, no one is safe from such spying, and even from harassment, as witness Tom Feeley, the man behind the website Information Clearing House, who had armed men invade his house at night and threaten his wife complaining about his First Amendment-protected effort to publicize important stories on the Internet.
[ cf The Land of the Silent and the Home of the Fearful ]
NO!!! Think of it as a civic duty that makes your friends in the Homeland Guard feel more like their staying out of the combat zone is still a critical and strategic reserve that we just have to have in these times, and that their actual deferment from following their ideological alignment into action has not been in vain!!!
Remember, FEAR NOW! FEAR OFTEN!!!
And keep on being fearful until the Terrorists are all on government contract grants as welfare queens of the monolithic nanny state.
The alternative would be to try to find real employment, and real lives for the Homeland Guards....