HIS204--Civil Liberties from 1865-Present

    Civil liberty in the United States of America has come through some tough opposition since after the Civil War.   There have also been some breakthroughs in education and activity outside of the home.  Technology has given our communication express, non-restricted potential.  There have also been many barriers in the matter of civil rights, let alone civil liberties.  America is supposed to be a democracy, a government for the people and by the people.  This implies that each person, so long as they do no harm to themselves or others, has “certain unalienable rights given to him by the Creator”  (Jefferson, 1776).  That is most likely what Abraham Lincoln was exclaiming when he outlawed slavery.  But, still, in economic terms, slavery to this day exists and it is even celebrated by those who would thoughtlessly hoard resources.  Ayn Rand said, “The smallest minority is the individual.  Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.”  (Cantoni, 2009)  This is a profound statement and the rest of this paper will expound on civil liberties, its successes, and its challenges.  Six civil liberty issues to be discussed here are African American’s stature after the Civil War, children’s education, prohibition and the War on Drugs, economic freedom, access to technology, and rights to privacy.

    Following the Civil War, African Americans faced much discrimination.  “Legislatures from southern states, encouraged by the same people who led the states out of the Union, made Black Codes which stopped African Americans from getting almost all of their rights.” (thinkquest.org, n.d.)  There were segregated uses of public facilities by which skin color determined quality of life.  This is a sad fact considering that the bloodiest war in American history was waged to make them free.  Even security and assurance that you will not be lynched by a mob was considered a liberty back then.  Few former slaves could read, so there rights to a proper education seemed far-fetched. 

    Though blacks were having a hard time after the Civil War, there were also then radical changes happening in education that effected everyone’s place in society.  The way that young people learned changed radically as the sources of their education multiplied.  Family guidance was becoming less, and as Bernard Bailyn (1960) mentioned, peer, media and gang influence was more.   “Many youths spend thousands of hours for eleven to twenty-two years in schools of various kinds, pre-schools, elementary schools, secondary schools, tutorials, colleges, propriety schools, graduate and professional schools, and continuing educations schools”  (Keller, 2008).  But, suffice to say, learning begins at home, and around the end of the 19th century, children were working in sweatshops and being more influenced more and more by the before mentioned groups.

    A legality that infringed upon civil liberty around the beginning of the 20th century was prohibition of alcohol.  “The Eighteenth Amendment, which gave Congress the power to create laws to enforce the prohibition of the "manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors" was passed by a so-called Progressive Congress in 1919.  Prohibition became the stuff of cultural legend in the 1920s with bootleggers, bathtub gin, and gang wars.  Prohibition only lasted 14 years, when the Twenty-first Amendment repealed it in 1933”  (Bowles, 2011).  Today, prohibition is a 10th Amendment issue with marijuana laws.  Now, “more than 30 percent of the U.S. population lives under some form of marijuana decriminalization, and according to government and academic studies, these laws have not contributed to an increase in marijuana consumption nor negatively impacted adolescent attitudes toward drug use.”  (norml.org, n.d.)  In the parts of America that still prohibit marijuana sale and consumption, civil liberty is being held hostage.  The benefit of this is to the tobacco corporations’ and gun lobbyist (among others) who pay for prisons to be built and run it from within the system that profits from the institution.  “The legalization of drugs would prevent our civil liberties from being threatened any further, it would reduce crime rates, reverse the potency effect, improve the quality of life in the inner cities, prevent the spread of disease, save the taxpayer money, generally benefit both individual and the community as a whole”  (Cussen, Block, 2000)

    About the economic bondage that is the largest restriction of our civil liberties--we live in a society that is in debt to itself.  But, no one can know where to all of that money has gone.  It could be said that it has built the great innovations in technology that make our lives comfortable.  But, is it really bliss to be comfortably numb?  No, most of the country is blind to the fact that we are being led like sheep to the slaughter.  A police state is being ushered in by legislation like the Patriot Act, Homeland Security, the Military Tribunal, and other legislation.  It is completely and totally design to take away our civil liberties.  Your home can be searched without a warrant when you are not even home, and you could be arrested or even killed under suspicion of being a terrorist.  Hitler used the same propaganda to get public support of doing away with the German Constitution and going to war, all in the name of national security.  He burnt down his own German, Parliament building, the Reichtag, and blaming it on communist/ terrorists.  Similar things happened in America on September 11, 2001.  The reality of creating money out of thin air allows evil, power hungry men to be able to advance their agenda.  This schism and scheme was catapulted into overdrive by the creation of the Federal Reserve, a privately owned institution of “bankers banks” (Bowles, 2011), who trade dollars for bonds printed by the Treasury Department which are also printed out of thin air.  With the idea of man creating something out of nothing, debt has enslaved us to the whims of a capitalist market.  The monopoly is on your labor, and the control is of your mind.  “The older vision, heald by the Constitutional Convention, of a citizen body of free farmers among whom equality of resources seemed altogether possible, perhaps even inevitable, no longer fits that reality of the new economic order in which economic enterprises automatically generate inequality among citizens in wealth, income, social standing, education, occupational prestige, and authority”  (Dhal, 1986).

    With more technological advancements came the need for ability to access use of new gadgets.  People living, today have capacity far beyond the telegraph or even a telephone line.  Now, we can immediately send and receive messages through cell phone texts, e mail, or fax.  The reach of our domain has been enlarged greatly.  People have liberty to express themselves and influence or effect the environment by a sort of amplifying their voice and reaching out more easily than ever.  The only catch is that it must be payed for with currency or credit.  Public libraries are being used to serve the technological needs of those living in poverty.  Keeping up with the change is not as simple as pick and choose if you need this or that or perhaps not.  In more recent times, everyone at least needs some enhanced ability to communicate abroad.  It‘s a matter of civil liberty, because there is a divide between the certain creeds and races who benefit from such luxury and those who do not.  “The bias of technological change determines its distributional implications, for example, which groups are the winners and which will be the losers from technological progress, and thus the willingness of different groups to embrace new technologies”  (Acemoglu, 2007).

    With the increased capacity to be heard, our First Amendment rights have been under scrutiny by government intrusion.  Today, the National Security Agency will monitor all communications, eliminating privacy for the sake of national security.  This legislative allowance is thought by many to be very unconstitutional and quite disturbing.  “After it was publicly disclosed in 2005 that the US government was conducting warrantless surveillance under the Terrorist Surveillance Program, dozens of lawsuits were filed against the government and cooperating telecommunication carriers on behalf of citizens who were illegally wire tapped as part of mass domestic warrantless surveillance programs”  (Hughes, 2012).  “First, privacy and security from terrorism need not be in conflict: when accounting for strategic interactions, reducing privacy protections does not necessarily increase security from terrorism. Second, and more important, the anti-terrorist agency will always want less privacy. The very agency whose expertise affords it disproportionate influence on policy making will prefer a reduction in privacy protections even when that reduction harms security from terrorism”  (Dragu, 2011).

    In conclusion, the manufactured illusion that one must pay a landlord in order to survive is being usurped by the call to unite for individual, civil liberty and universal, God-given rights.  From African-Americans being discriminated against to no one being able to keep anything private, civil liberty has never been bulletproof.  It is, however, being demanded more and more.  As Thomas Jefferson and some of our founding fathers envisioned in the Declaration for Independence,  nothing stands between the Creator and the Creator’s creations besides the illusions of superiority some creatures may have and the legalities certain creatures have added to or taken away from the universal law of interdependency and mechanics of equilibrium.  Many have taken to fight against such tyranny, and we are assured a victory.  This is known to be absolutely certain, because of the reactions and measurements in quantum mechanics.  Civil liberty is not just an allowance by some human authority, it must be granted.  The denial of civil liberty is creating metaphysical discord in the vibratory energy that sustains life.  In the battle, it is seeming that we are collectively taking two steps forward and three steps backward.  Together, we have made much progress, but the truth is there is still a lot missing when it comes to freedom.  “Capitalist societies are full of unacceptable inequalities. Freedom is of paramount importance. These two convictions are widely shared across the world. Yet they often seem in complete contradiction with each other. Fighting inequality jeopardizes freedom; taking freedom seriously boosts inequality. What can be done?”  (Parjis, 2011)  “We live in a world of unprecedented opulence, of a kind that would have been hard to imagine even a century or two ago”  (Sen, 2001).  Why should we not live in access abundance and total, unequivocal, civil liberty granted?  A big part of the problem is monies and how they are produced, why they are traded, and also, at least in America, our political system.  "We have to nationalize the banks. We have to get rid of the government. We need to have access to the internet seen as a human right. We need to have a new Constitution," said Birgitta Jonsdottir, founder of the Icelandic Pirate Party.  (Gibson, 2013).  With unity and a clear set of goals the Occupy Movement can for America can get us in on the beginning of civilization.







References


Acemoglu, Daron (Sep., 2007).  Equilibrium Bias of Technology.  Econometrica, Vol. 75, No. 5, pp. 1371-1409

Bailyn, Bernard (1960).  Education in the Forming of American Society: Needs and Opportunities for Study. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Bowles, M. (2011). A history of the United States since 1865. San Diego, CA: Bridgepoint Education, Inc.

Cantoni, C. J. (2009). The “Will of the People”.  Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, 14(3), 77.

Cussen, M. & Block, W.  (Jul. 2000).  Legalize Drugs Now!:  An Analysis of the Benefits of Legalizing Drugs.  The American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 59, No. 3 , pp 525-536

Dahl, R. A. (1986). A Preface to Economic Democracy (No. 28). Univ of California Press.

Dragu, T.  (February, 2011).  Is There a Trade-off between Security and Liberty? Executive Bias, Privacy Protections, and Terrorism Prevention.  The American Political Science Review Vol. 105, No. 1, pp. 64-78

Gibson, Carl (June 5, 2013).  5 Ways the U.S. Can Have an Icelandic Revolution.  The Huffington Post.  Retrieved from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/carl-gibson/have-an-icelandic-revolution_b_3391151.html

Myth #9:  After the Civil War all black men had the right to vote. (n.d). 
Retrieved from http://library.thinkquest.org/J0112391/myth_9.htm

Hughes, S. S.  (November 3, 2012).  US Domestic Surveillance after 9/11: An Analysis of the Chilling Effect on First Amendment Rights in Cases Filed against the Terrorist Surveillance Program.  Canadian Journal of Law and Society, Volume 27 pp. 399-425.  Retrieved from http://muse.jhu.edu.proxy-library.ashford.edu/journals/canadian_journal_of_law_and_society/v027/27.3.hughes.html

Keller, G.(2008). Higher Education and the New Society. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Retrieved June 2, 2013, from Project MUSE database.

Parijs, P. V. (2011). Real freedom for all: What (if anything) can justify capitalism?. OUP Catalogue.
   
Sen, A. (2001). Development as freedom. Oxford Paperbacks.

U.S. Declaration of Independence, Paragraph 2 (1776)

Zeitgeist - Destroying Your Civil Liberties (Uploaded March 9, 2010 by zeitgeistau)  Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MB3YC6NDdYY