Welcome back to the land of the free and the home of the brave — especially in Congress.

Well, it’s not only Congress that is afraid to tell the truth and forcefully oppose President George W. Bush’s escalation in Iraq and coming attack on Iran.

Despite the best efforts of a few thousand activists on both coasts, the mainstream of the American people remain muted, unwilling to take to the streets or make too vociferous a stand against this slaughter.

Both pull their punches for the same two reasons.

One is the inculcated patriotism that Americans are taught to accept from an earliest age. Part of this is a lionization of American militarism, which oozes from the pages of most history taught to children here.

We have developed a natural knee jerk reverence for the mythology of our glorious struggle to maintain our “freedoms” against those who would do us harm — and those people, whether they be Spaniards, Soviets, Muslims or whoever, are always amazingly there, manufactured for our consent to whatever war our leaders wish.

And any meaningful action against American militarism runs smack into the manufactured reaction against the “Vietnam syndrome” when America’s soldiers were derided for being asked to win a war that Jane Fonda, et al, helped lose. The soldiers who volunteer to fight for the empire must therefore also be lionized since they are just doing their patriotic duty to keep us safe.

Which of course is a mission that looks very different to the average resident of Baghdad nowadays. But we’re taught not to care about that. People from other lands don’t count and in fact, our leaders express amazement at the lack of “gratitude” shown from the liberated Iraqis. Many Americans do as well.

The second major reason that both Congress and average Americans still tend to mute their critiques of the war in safe, pro-America language is the spectre of another 9/11 event — a terrorist attack on the American homeland.

Every member of Congress knows that too strident opposition to the war and the President could backfire horribly in the face of another domestic terrorist attack. American public opinion, characteristically 100 miles wide and an inch deep, is easily manipulated into knee jerk patriotic reaction (almost like hardwiring) and no elected representative wants to be caught on the wrong side of that reaction.

After all, today’s principled sound bite could be tomorrow’s “soft on terror.” Politicians don’t count on the reasoning skills of the average American voter so they know they must tread carefully.

It is for this reason that Hillary Clinton will not sign off to Cindy Sheehan’s anti-war movement. It is for this reason that major politicians (except for, God bless him, Dennis Kucinich) both running for President and not, will not appear at any major public anti-war rallies.

And Americans, who forget much and quickly, will remember the post 9/11 reactions of the government and law enforcement against those who made intemperate remarks in health clubs who later received knocks on their door from the FBI.

After all, under a Patriot Act that the Democrats have shown no stomach for rescinding, if the President can declare anyone, even an American citizen, as an enemy combatant, why tempt following Jose Padilla into that bad night of Guantanamo?

So even now, no matter how much our consciences bother us about how we were lied into this war, no matter even if we see the real cost of this war both to the Iraqis and ourselves, even though our still small voice looks at our draft age children and yearns to publicly speak out against the coming nuclear madness with Iran, many of us keep a certain stillness, a certain restraint.

People remember what you say, after all.

A new quiet American is born — one part born of inculcation, the other born out of a real fear of landing on a no-fly list, for starters.

Here in the land of the free and the home of the brave, we have allowed ourselves to be made less free to speak reason to power and less brave to overcome that fear of taking a stand.

With all the nifty toys most of us have to play with and the promise of attaining “the American dream” and the fact that people we don’t know from small town America are still doing the fighting and dying, perhaps average Americans still feel they have too much to put at risk to speak out now.

It may sound trite, but men like Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Niemoller understood that human reaction very well.

Keith Gottschalk

Keith Gottschalk

U.S. Keith Gottschalk has written for daily newspapers in Iowa, Illinois and Ohio. He also had a recent stint as a radio talk show host in Illinois. As a result of living in the high ground...