For the first time in my life, I can see how something like the Japanese internment camps could happen in our country."
That comment was made by the faculty president at Cal State-Sacramento after watching a graduation speaker get booed and heckled off the stage for raising questions about the government's response to terrorism.
The speaker, the publisher of the Sacramento Bee, urged the audience to safeguard their rights to free speech, against unlawful detainment and for a fair trial. Many in the graduation ceremony crowd loudly booed her remarks, and when she asked what would happen if racial profiling becomes routine, the crowd cheered.
She went on to tell the graduates that "the Constitution makes it our right to challenge government policies," at which point the crowd broke into a clapping chant and forced her off the stage.
Several in the audience defended their reaction to the speech and blamed Publisher Janis Heaphy for inappropriately talking politics at the graduation. And the conservative talk show hosts in Sacramento, of course, lambasted her, defending the crowd's reaction.
Those who have seen a video recording of the nine-minute talk are appalled.
She began the speech: "No one argues the validity and need for both retaliation and security. But to what lengths are we willing to go to achieve them? Specifically, to what degree are we willing to compromise our civil liberties in the name of security?"
Many members of the audience obviously agree with Attorney General John Ashcroft that to criticize the government amounts to aiding the enemy.
I got a charge out of the reaction of the ACLU director in Los Angeles.
"We've always known that if you took the Bill of Rights to the street and asked most people to sign it, you would be unable to get a majority of Americans to do so," she said.
No kidding.
John Patrick Hunter, this paper's retired associate editor, found that out way back in 1951. That was another time when all too many Americans felt it inappropriate to speak out. A fellow named Sen. Joe McCarthy, not at all unlike John Ashcroft, was using his government position to insinuate that people with differing views were un-American.
So when Hunter, on the Fourth of July no less, sought to get Madisonians to sign a document that was actually the Bill of Rights, only one out of 112 would do so. Most felt it was some kind of subversive screed.
Funny, isn't it, how so many forget what makes America America.
Dave Zweifel is editor of The Capital Times.
Copyright 2001 The Capital Times
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