Are our civil rights in jeopardy?

"Give me the liberty to know, to think, to believe, and to utter freely according to conscience, above all other liberties." John Milton

My innermost feelings about freedom, specifically our freedom to say what we want to convey to others but sometimes don’t have the courage to do so, go all the way back to my roots of origin, the country where I was born. I grew up during the Marcos’ regime in the Philippines with a dictator who absolutely killed our human rights and freedom to be ourselves. The freedom of the Filipinos became a thing of the past, we became a people who once peacefully existed in a “once upon a time” democratic era, and with Marcos governing us the only thing required of us was to be passive to let him do what he wanted to do to us. This dictator totally robbed all the freedom of the Filipinos to be ourselves, to peacefully assemble together, to express our needs as citizens who so passionately wanted to be heard that we would do anything to achieve it.

In the Philippines, the restriction to our freedom was the rule. Free speech, free assembly, free journalistic endeavors are the exceptions to the government's ridiculous made-up rules! It was very sad. But there wasn't anything that we could do about it. Everybody was very afraid of his governance or the lack thereof because he was the one who killed his enemies... even his friends or just about anybody who gets in his way. We tried the best way we could to cope and hope that someday it will all change and go back to normal, just like how it was before he took over the administration. After the death of my father, an excellent human being, author, honest community leader, who passed away when I was twelve years, I swore by my father’s grave that I will avenge his death. I promised him that I will open the eyes of my co-fellow men to the evils of the government that massively lacked governance and the skills to do so. It was then when I decided to come to America, where there’s free flow of ideas, which to me at a young age was a sign of democracy.

I was reading a lot of American articles and in my mind had formed thoughts that what we had in the poor restricted Philippines was simply a puppet democracy put up by the Reagan administration so that the United States can continue to massively exploit the Philippine natural resources to dangerously low levels. I was aware of all these things, but I did not have the courage to say things that were supposed to have been said during the past two decades to open people’s mind to the truth.

As an American, living in the United States, sometimes I feel like the same thing that I went through in the Philippines, in my opinion, is happening again. The US government wants us to be passive and be silent as they use the confusion and chaos of terrorism as their copout as they meddle in our civil rights to the point of taking them away! Why? Is it because the military industrial complex is so mighty that we cannot question anything?