At first it seemed like a nice patriotic sentiment, but recent events have awakened me to the recognition that it is a dangerous falsehood. After all, the 15th Amendment formally enfranchised blacks, but that didn't go far on election days — it would be nearly a century until the promise was fulfilled. Without our awareness and vigilant defense of freedoms, the Constitution is no more than discolored paper.

Many of my friends have expressed dismay over Americans' failure to counter assaults on our Bill of Rights by Attorney General John Ashcroft and the Bush administration. They shouldn't be surprised. Our freedoms have been under bipartisan attack for years, with little citizen resistance.

It's easy to blame our recent compliance on reaction to Sept. 11 or sparse media coverage of government critics. Both play a role, but the ease with which Americans have ceded liberty in the name of safety represents a more deeply-rooted problem — a national ignorance of our own civil rights history. Perhaps we do not aggressively defend our own Constitutional rights because we don't appreciate their origin and importance.

Supporting this theory is an annual poll that gauges citizen knowledge and attitudes toward the First Amendment, commissioned by Vanderbilt University's Freedom Forum. In 2001, 29 percent of respondents agreed strongly with the statement "The First Amendment goes too far in the rights it guarantees," while another 10 percent simply agreed, suggesting that almost four in 10 people believe we enjoy too much freedom of expression. That number rose dramatically from previous years.

But this is just a passing reaction to Sept. 11; we're still freedom-loving people, right? Sorry: the poll was taken last April.

Chillingly, the poll also found 23 percent of respondents disagreed that "newspapers should be able to publish freely without government approval of a story" and only 57 percent agreed strongly that "newspapers should be allowed to criticize public officials."

Disrespect for the Constitution by those in power is not a new phenomenon with the Bush administration, but a perpetual threat to guard against. When President Clinton alarmingly stated in 1993 that "The United States can't be so fixed on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans," barely a murmur was heard in response. And majorities of both major parties supported the 1996 "anti-terrorism" act, which initiated erosions of civil liberties accelerated by the Bush administration.

Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy warns that "The Constitution needs renewal and understanding each generation, or it's not going to last." Key to such understanding is recognizing that early Americans were reluctant to establish a central government powerful enough to suppress freedom. Many fled England to flee precisely that power. The Constitution was ratified only because Congress promised to add guarantees of liberty — the Bill of Rights — in a permanent contract between citizens and their government.

Yet today we permit these rights to be treated as privileges that Congress or White House officials may choose to ignore or revoke. Our founders would be apoplectic to witness our Attorney Genera l — the man who lost his Senate seat to a dead man in 2000 — contemptuously accuse civil rights defenders of aiding terrorists. Yet no member of Congress or major newspaper has called for his removal.

Mr. Ashcroft derided his critics as using "phantoms of lost liberty" while he unconstitutionally holds hundreds of people in prison without charges (the Bill of Rights makes no exceptions for non-citizens). If we let it happen to "them" without a fight, we will richly deserve the loss of our own freedom. Generations of Americans in the military and social justice movements have fought and died for rights we enjoy today, but our Constitution still is not self-enforcing.

So how can we who value civil rights counter infringement on our hard-won freedoms? There's no quick fix. We must rally to stop further encroachments, but we also need to sow seeds for future liberty by passing forgotten values to our children and reinvigorate a culture of freedom. We should strive to engage our young people in civics, facilitate their understanding beyond check-box memorization of historical facts, and promote a sense of patriotism involving loyalty to our Constitutional principles, not blind obedience to power.

We'll need more than those who deem themselves civil rights activists to build a critical mass of resistance, and we'll need to reach beyond comfortable, effortless actions like e-mails and petitions. For my part, I publicly call for John Ashcroft's impeachment for subverting the Constitution he is charged to uphold and urge area government and civic leaders to honor Martin Luther King Day by joining a rally to support the Bill of Rights and rebut its assailants.

While truly harmful laws like the "USA Patriot Act" already have passed, we have reason for hope. Remember that serious attacks on liberties have succeeded many times in our past — notably during every major war. Yet each time our rights have been curtailed, we not only have struggled successfully to reclaim those rights, but furthered freedom.

We can and must do it again. But while we organize to restore freedoms lost, let's strive to ensure that future generations will have no need to repeat our defensive struggle, but instead can progress further still toward a nation of liberty and justice for all.

Jeff Milchen founded ReclaimDemocracy.org, a Boulder-based non-profit organization devoted to revitalizing democracy and revoking illegitimate power of corporations over civic society. Visit online or call (303) 402-0105. For information MLK day rally information call (303) 444-6981.

Copyright 2002 The Daily Camera.

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