Dear Editor,

I have yet to meet anyone wailing about Bush and the Patriot Act “taking our rights!” who can name a single thing they could do pre-Bush that any Bush policy prevents them from doing now.

These same partisan alarmists decry anti-terrorism measures for “invading our privacy!” like library lists. Yet they are either woefully ignorant of, or choose to endorse, far more legitimate threats to what little remains of our privacy.

Witness the wildly burgeoning proliferation of private and government surveillance cameras, the capability of talented 15 year-old hackers to access almost any medical, legal or other database, commercially available scanners that can eavesdrop on cell phone calls, search engines that tell where children and women live and the epidemic of GPS devices in cell phones and cars that can tell corporations and government everywhere we go and when.

These are but a few examples of the terrible risks we’re taking by letting partisan politics distract us from reality. When our radar gets narrowed by political myopia we may miss ominous little articles buried deep in the Oct. 9 LA Times: “The fate of an endangered fish in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta is expected to lead to a federal court-imposed cutback of 30 percent on water supplies to southern California.”

Thirty percent of human water supply, to all of southern California, government-slashed for a fish? Ever hear the phrase: “As California goes, so goes the nation?”

Can any of us afford to be blinded by political hate? Look what it’s done to our universities: Kids are taught to listen respectfully to the likes of Mahmoud Ahmadinijad (Columbia) and black racist professors advocating white genocide (NCSU), yet they are encouraged to jeer down what few conservative voices are allowed on campus.

There are snakes on our plane, folks, and we’re still looking out the windows.

William Slusher

Okanogan